The Burnt Toast Podcast

You're listening to Burnt Toast! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.And it's time for the episode we look forward to all year long—ever since we made it a tradition exactly one year ago! It is time for... The Year In Butters, where we look back at everything we've recommended in the past year and tell you what's still buttery and what has...gone rancid. If you're new here: Butter is what we call the recommendation segment at the end of every episode. It might be a new favorite food, a great book, an experience, or a state of mind. But since we give recs every week, some Butters stand the test of time more than others! Find out if we still love...🧈 Tracking Virginia's hydration? 🧈 Corinne's new shower head? 🧈 The $16 sundress Virginia bought last summer! 🧈 And so many more! To get the full schmear, you’ll need to be a paid Burnt Toast subscriber. Membership starts at just $5 per month and is the best way to support our work! (Just want the Butter, no strings attached? Buy this episode for just $4.)🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈This episode contains affiliate links. Thank you for supporting Burnt Toast when you shop our links! Episode 224 TranscriptCorinneWell our big realization when we did this last year was that a lot of things we had recommended, like clothes, hadn't stood the test of time.VirginiaThey sure did not. We took a real hard look at my fast fashion problem. And I think I've made some real progress on that front, so I'm excited. I think a lot of our Butters held up pretty well this year...but we'll see. CorinneYeah, when I was compiling this I could tell that we were having a reaction to the clothes recommendation thing, because I think there is maybe, like, one this year.VirginiaWell, it is a lot to think of a Butter all the time! When I invented this segment, I did not know what I was doing. Podcast guests always get very nervous about the Butter. (We're not going to go over the guests’ Butters, by the way. These are just the Butters that Corinne and I have recommended together on our episodes, or we'd be here all day.) It is a lot of effort every week thinking of a Butter. I try really hard to think of something that's a little quirky and random, and not necessarily something you have to buy, though sometimes they are things you could buy. What are your criteria for a good Butter?CorinneWell, I think we have both found that if you don't think about it a little bit in advance, and then when you're on the spot, everything you've ever liked just falls out of your brain.VirginiaYes, then you don't like anything. Nothing is good.CorinneThis year, for 2025, I really leaned into food and media Butters. I was basically recommending whatever I was enjoying making for dinner or a snack, or what I was watching or reading.VirginiaI do think those are the best butters. Although I always enjoy it when we have a wild card. My favorite ever Burnt Toast Butter probably still is your sun face shield, which was one of the very first Butters you ever buttered. It was so out of the box and delightful to me.CorinneThat one really did not stand the test of time.VirginiaI know. I guess for me—as much as I think it's valuable for us to look at what Butters hold up—sometimes a Butter is just a moment in time. Not all Butters are lifetime Butters. Some Butters are more fleeting. They're like the the sand art and, you know, that's fine.CorinneMaybe in 2026 we should try to have more wackadoo butters.VirginiaI would definitely be here for that. Okay, should we jump in and go back and forth?CorinneMy first Butter of last year was the Connally Goods denim chore jacket, which is named after me. My last name, Fay.VirginiaSo obviously a great Butter right there. CorinneI stand by this one. VirginiaFor you to back away from a denim chore coat would be breaking news. CorinneThey actually just came out with a brown version that has blue stitching, and I ordered that.VirginiaSo, you are doubling down on this Butter. You're going to be a Double Butter on the denim chore coat.CorinneI think that is my only clothing one of the entire year.VirginiaWell, and Connally Goods is not fast fashion, right? It's company we feel great about supporting. A good slow fashion brand. And my Butter from that episode was the brownies you sent me for Christmas last year from Vesta Chocolate. And I'm going to say, Yeah, that one holds up. I mean, I haven't had them since, but this is making me be like, ooh, who do I want to send those to? Maybe myself?CorinneI think it's hard for brownies to not hold up.VirginiaThat's going to be an evergreen Butter in the Burnt Toast universe. Okay, your next one was the TV show Bad Sisters.CorinneGood one. I still like that show. VirginiaI still haven't watched the second season. The first season was amazing.CorinneYeah, can't say I've re watched it, but.VirginiaIt's a great clothes show.CorinneYes, and I love Sharon Horgan.Okay, yours was Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza.VirginiaThis is a good Butter and if you don't have that card game, and you regularly play card games, especially with kids, I recommend it. It's great if you have younger kids who aren't as good at harder card games—they can do well at it. We haven't been playing it as much recently, but I'm not getting rid of it. I think we've just cycled into other games for the moment? But it's a good one to have on hand if you have a crowd of people you're trying to get united in some way. This is a good crowd pleaser. CorinneYeah, that sounds fun. I feel like sometimes when you play a game a lot it gets too easy.VirginiaYou can get expansion packs that make it harder, and we do have some of those, but we just kind of maxed out on it for a minute. I could see that come back around.Okay, I've completely forgotten what your next one is. This outline just says the word Anora and I don't know what that is.CorinneThat's crazy, because it was a movie that came out at the very end of 2024 and won a bunch of awards.VirginiaOh yes! And it had what's her face from Better Things in it?CorinneYes. Mikey Madison. I stand by that. I thought that was a really good movie.VirginiaI have not seen it, but I love Mikey Madison in Better Things, which I believe was another Butter of mine last year. So, yes, great.CorinneYour next one was shearling, big buckle, Birkenstock clogs.VirginiaOn my feet right now. Absolute lifetime Butter, these clogs. I think I'm on my third pair? I've been wearing them eight years probably. They do wear out. I wish they lasted a little longer. Shearling often starts to kind of go bald on you. But they are my forever house shoes in cold weather, and they make me so happy.CorinneThat sounds really comfy. VirginiaI've still never bought Birkenstock clogs for outside of the house wear. but they're great slippers. If you're someone who works from home, invest in your slippers. Your feet are important. Okay, your next one is the book The Safekeep.CorinneThat was one of the best books I read this year.VirginiaI co-sign. I read it on your recommendation. My whole book club loved it. And we do not always agree on books. We don't always have the same taste, and we were all uniformly obsessed with that book. And then my mom's book club read it, and they were more mixed.CorinneOoh, interesting. VirginiaI think it was a little spicy for them? But I think I like that for them. My mom loved it. She got it.CorinneThat was one of those books I read, and then was just trying to get everyone I know to read it.VirginiaBecause you just want to talk about it. It's wild, it's so wild. I'm excited for anyone who needs a good holiday read. It's just such a good immersive novel. If you haven't read it, pick it up for your winter break read. CorinneOkay, your next one is one I am very curious about. It is the Water Llama hydration tracking app.VirginiaWe might have reached our first dud.CorinneHow long was Water Llama in your life?VirginiaI definitely Water Llama-ed for a few months. CorinneOh, that's a pretty long time. VirginiaI had maybe, like two-ish months, three months? So for folks who don't remember: This is an app that tracks your hydration throughout the day. The reason I started doing it was because I was having so many headaches and I thought I was dehydrated. And then I figured out that probably I have so many headaches because I have sleep apnea, so hydration became less of a focus. But what I'm actually proud of is that I didn't keep tracking. Because I am someone who can be a little too into tracking. I think the fact that I let go of tracking Water Llama is a sign of personal growth. CorinneI love that. VirginiaAnd if you do need to track hydration for medical reasons or whatever, it is a delightful app to use. But it's also okay to break up with tracking when it doesn't serve you.I do feel like I'm overall a little better hydrated, though, from the experience.  When I do a weightlifting workout now, I always make sure to have my big water bottle with me now. All right, you were really on the media kick. Your next one is the TV show Severance.CorinneStand by it. That was great. I feel like it was really fun to be watching Severance every week earlier this year. It was one of those shows that everyone I know was talking about. VirginiaI missed out on that! For some reason I loved the first season and have not watched the second season. CorinneOh my gosh.VirginiaI gotta get that and Bad Sisters going again.CorinneThis is Apple TV. You need to re subscribe to Apple TV.Virginia I am. I'm watching Slow Horses on it right now. So these will be next. CorinneAll right. Yours from this episode was...meatballs.VirginiaI mean, obviously I'm still pro-meatballs. I'm assuming there was a specific kind of meatball? Or a reason?CorinneI don't think there was a specific recipe, but I think you were like, "Meatballs are great because some people can eat pasta, some people can eat sauce, some people can eat meatballs."But it's so funny because I just saw a Tiktok that was like, "What is the deal with New York Times Cooking and meatballs? They are pushing meatball propaganda." And later in the year, I did recommend a New York Times Cooking meatball recipe.VirginiaWe're all in Big Meatball's pocket. I mean, I do feel like this recommendation could have been "dinner." Virginia's Butter is...eating.CorinneNo, I think it was like, meatballs as a good meal where people can pick and choose. Some people can eat pasta, some people can eat meatballs.VirginiaWe do still use them that way. Because the night the kids come back to my house is always a pasta night and one of my kids is a vegetarian, so we can't do a meat sauce. So we do often make her favorite marinara sauce and then have meatballs on the side for the meat eaters. I stand by it as a dinner crowd pleaser. CorinneEven as a single person meal, I feel like meatballs make pasta and sauce feel more substantial.VirginiaI definitely agree with that. Okay, you have Dune Sunscreen.CorinneI really like that sunscreen. I will say it is very expensive. It's less of a makeup-y sunscreen, so it's pretty liquidy. And it has a slight green color when it comes out. But I like how it goes into my skin. Virginia"I like putting green sunscreen in my skin."CorinneOkay, it's not bright green.VirginiaHave you considered a career as a beauty influencer?CorinneYes, obviously.Virginia"Guys, it's real green, and then it just goes into your skin."CorinneOkay, so you know what? It's a good sunscreen. Okay, well, yours, beauty influencer, was the magic Vulva Balm.VirginiaYou know, it's not green. And it does go into your skin. Certain types of skin. I'm not using this as regularly. Whatever chafing issues I was having at the time have have resolved, but I definitely keep it on hand. And I think if you're dealing with any dryness, it's a good starting point. I will say, don't rule out, like, do you have a yeast infection? Do you need some vaginal estrogen cream? For those of us in the perimenopause season, there can be a lot going on down there that you want to pay attention to. But this is a good starting point for short-term relieving discomfort. It's a great product. Okay, Corinne, how is your new shower head?CorinneIt is still there! Still working.VirginiaIs it bringing you as much joy as it was initially?CorinneWell, I think the joy I was experiencing at the time was that my old shower head was really effed up and not working well, and I changed it out myself. And I was just like, oh, that was a lot easier than I expected. And the new one is so much better than the old one. So I will say the joy has worn off a little bit. Now I'm just like, yeah, I have a shower that works.VirginiaAlways great, but also sort of a baseline expectation.CorinneYeah, but at the time, it was a revelation.VirginiaWell, I do think the advice to solve one small annoying thing in your house is good. That really does bring a lot of joy when you can tackle something, especially when it's something you think is going to be a nightmare to fix, and then it's actually not that big a deal.CorinneI didn't realize how bad the old one was until I put in the new one. And I was like, whoa, I could have more than a trickle of water hitting my bodyVirginiaThis is like when we first started dating, Jack changed the light bulb in my shower that had been out for like, I don't know, seven years, probably? I just had accepted that I lived that way. I was like, "I have a dark shower. Some people have dark showers." CorinneThat's really funny.VirginiaAnd it is a really dark shower. It's like, not a tub with a curtain. It's like, there's only one little door at the end. So it was real dark, and now it's not. That was quite revelation to me.CorinneWow. I can see why you kept Jack around.VirginiaWho knew light bulbs could be changed, guys? I learned. 2025 was a big year for me.CorinneAll right, your next one was giant coloring sheets. (Other options here and here.)VirginiaI do think these are great. We haven't done them in a while, so it's possible this was a Moment in Time Butter. It's a great thing to put out on the table if you're going to have people over, or if you just need a casual way to interact with your kids, especially if your kids are in a prickly phase. Just sitting down and starting to color is often a way to bring them like a moth to the flame. But it is the kind of thing that will stop working after a bit. Because then they're like, we've colored a giant coloring sheet. I don't know. It didn't become a family passion. I think when I first got them, I was like, "This is our new hobby!" And it's more like...we did this for a bit. Maybe I'll break it out with a different group of kids sometime. But I do remember when Amy's kids visited, and I put one out thinking it would be a good way for the kids to all kind of bond, who don't see each other super often. And nobody touched it. They were also off doing other things. It wasn't like we needed it. CorinneSounds kind of similar to taco, llama whatever. Goat Cheese. Water. Hydration. Taco Llama, hydration. Goat cheese.VirginiaYeah, I think sometimes you hit on something that really works to bring kids together and create a joyful family moment, and it's okay to just let it be like that one time or two or three times, and not have it be a forever thing.CorinneYeah, totally.VirginiaAll right, yours is black snail tea from Little Red Cup Tea Company.CorinneI stand by this one. An old friend of mine runs Little Red Cup Tea Company. And black snail is a really good tea that I always have on hand. But they also have a bunch of good teas. If you're a tea drinker, it's all Chinese tea, and I would say it's an upgrade if you're just drinking like whatever grocery store black tea.VirginiaCelestial Seasonings, no shade.CorinneYeah, delicious, delicious tea. Okay, yours was starting plants from seed.VirginiaOh, yeah, we did a lot of that this spring. I did way more from seed than I ever had before. And yeah, I stand by it. I had a really nice mix of flowers in the cutting garden that I wouldn't have had if I had just bought starts at the nursery. I was able to really plan which colors I wanted and grow different varieties of zinnias and cosmos that you don't usually find. So that was really fun. And we had great tomatoes. I'm trying to think if we had any real duds on what we started. We were a little too successful. We ended up with a lot of plants we had to give away.CorinneWill you be doing this again?VirginiaYes, I think we will. I think we'll try to be more strategic. And we also need to think through some logistics about where in the house the seeds live. We did them in the guest room last year. That worked pretty well, but then it was a pain to carry everything downstairs when it was time to start putting them out. I definitely wouldn't recommend it so much for new gardeners. I think it's a lot of work and stress to keep your seedlings going. And we did have a crop fail because we went on vacation and the pet sitter didn't water enough, and then we had to restart some stuff. So it's not without its headaches. But if you've been like a, you know, a seasoned gardener looking to up your game, I think it's time. I think you're ready. CorinneWhen do you start stuff? VirginiaWell, it's all plant specific. And depends on your growing zone. So in New York, there's some stuff I could start as early as March, and there's some stuff it doesn't make sense to start till the end of April. It's all over the map. So that's a lot of planning. For the next episode, you recommended the book Stag Dance, which is another co-Butter recommendation.CorinneYeah, That is a book by Torrey Peters. And another one of, I would say, the best books I read this year. YReally enjoyed.VirginiaAlso endorsed by my Hot Tub Book Club. Apparently you pick all our best reads. So good job. CorinneWhat are you guys reading now? I need a rec.VirginiaWe just did Kate Bear's new book of poetry, which was a fun one. But we haven't picked for next month. Yeah, Stag Dance is fun. It's really strange. It's short stories, which I often don't like, but I did like in this case.CorinneYours from this episode was...chickens.VirginiaStill pro-chickens. Also can't underscore enough that I would not get chickens if you don't have people in your household committed to chicken care. Because part of why I can endorse them is that I do very little work for them. But we are getting a lot of eggs now, and I am really enjoying the egg situation. And they are quite charming. As pets go—and keep in mind, I am a household that has four species of pets. We have mammals, we have chickens, we have reptiles I've had a fish tank in the past. I'm a seasoned pet owner—I would say chickens are less work than a lot of pets, and higher reward. They're not much more work than reptiles, but they're a lot more interactive and fun and you get the eggs and it gets everyone outside. So I really like having chickens with kids.CorinneHave you had to deal with any chicken death?VirginiaNo, we are very lucky that so far, all eight of our ladies are going strong. We haven't had chicken tragedies. We put a lot of thought into predator protection, which is a big concern in our neighborhood. I think we have some neighbors who are less careful about predator protection, and therefore they're kind of the frontline chickens and ours are surviving. I would say the greatest threat to them is our Bernedoodle, Penelope, who loves them so much and sometimes gets a little confused about her role as chicken guarder. Um, I don't know how to pronounce your next one, Mango Izze?CorinneYes, this is like a mango flavored like soda type of thing. I mean, still delicious. I'm not feeling enthusiastic about this right now. I don't have any in my fridge, But I did go through a real Mango Izze phase.VirginiaI could see mango being one of those flavors that you're really into for a bit, and then you're like, I've had a lot of mango. I'm ready for something else.CorinneI started on the mango, and then I got some other Izze flavors, and I think mango is actually really the best. And also, like, it's less versatile than just having seltzer.All right, your swing for the living room.VirginiaOh yeah. Oh man, best $80 I've ever spent on my children, hands down, is the sensory swing in our family room. I did have to replace the fabric because a child, and I don't know that it was my child, but some child did go in the swing with child scissors. and there was a hole that then turned into ripping the swing. CorinneWhoa. VirginiaDidn't see that coming. But not sure I can blame the swing manufacturers for this. CorinneSwinging with scissors sounds really scary.VirginiaObviously, it was not a parent-endorsed move. I wasn't there when it happened. I don't really know the details. I just know suddenly the swing had a big rip in it, and we've had a talk about no sharp objects in the swing. But the second one is holding up very well, and I'd already put the bolt in the ceiling and the cable and everything. I just had to replace the fabric. So it wasn't a huge issue. Obviously, this is kid to kid, but if you have a kid with any kind of sensory stuff, neurodivergence, but also just like any kid who, needs a comforting spot. It's a really, really great tool. Swinging is really regulating for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. CorinneThat's awesome. VirginiaOkay, the next episode, I think this was a summer episode, and we were both on a salad kick, so that's kind of funny. We don't tell each other our butters before we record usually, so it's like, then we just both happen to recommend salads. So yours was the Smitten Kitchen garlic lime steak and noodle salad.CorinneYeah, that's a good recipe. I stand by it. But yeah, again, a summer recipe. I'm not making it right now. It's a cold noodle with steak thing. VirginiaI mean, it sounds great.CorinneYeah, I'm more going for warm foods right now. And yours was sushi salad. It was like leftover sushi made into a salad.VirginiaYes, I do still do this with leftover sushi, because you know how sometimes you over order a little on sushi? You don't have a whole roll left. You have like three pieces, or you have like a weird amount of sushi where it's not a meal on its own. CorinneAnd I feel like leftover sushi gets a little dried out.VirginiaChop it up, toss it in a salad with whatever. I usually do, like, lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, maybe some shallot or red onion or something. I try to do some, like, vaguely Asian ish feeling vinaigrette. I have, like, a store bought honey, Ginger one I use a lot. Or if I have some of the spicy mayonnaise left over, I'll use that to make a dressing. CorinneThat sounds good. VirginiaIt's such a good lunch. It's really quick. It's a great thing to do with leftover sushi. Love it. All right, you were back to TV the next month with rewatching Girls.CorinneI mean, stand by it. VirginiaYou have not backed away from a single Butter!CorinneI feel like my most backed away from was Mango Izze.VirginiaOh yeah, you were a little over that, but that could come back, too. CorinneI mean, it's a classic, you know? What am I going to say?VirginiaYeah, absolutely. Lena Dunham is a gift. CorinneYour next one is a fast fashion, Old Navy crinkle gauze maxi dress and not worrying about bra straps.VirginiaOkay, I continue to not worry about visible bra straps, and that has been liberating for me. Yeah, the maxi dress. Was a $16 crinkly cotton maxi dress ever going to be a lifetime purchase? Like, did we expect that from it? We didn't. I don't think. (Note: It appears to be gone from Old Navy's website, so clearly they didn't expect it to last either!) CorinneIt will not be coming with us into 2026? VirginiaI mean, I don't know. It might. It's also like, it's December. We just had our first snow day. Obviously it's nowhere near my brain right now. The fabric was looking a little worn by the end of the season. But it might be like a pool cover up, or it might not. It was for the moment. All right, yeah. I know the next one is a shopping purchase that holds up... Baggu bags.CorinneYep, stand by it. Feel like I really doubled down on things that are going to stand the test of time. I just used a Baggu Bag this morning.VirginiaI feel like I use them in all aspects of my life. They go in the car to the grocery store. I have all the pouches and organized things. My favorite purse is a Baggu. It's a great brand. It's a great brand. CorinneAgree.All right, what about one minute planks and possibly learning how to do a push-up?VirginiaI think what we're learning about us is...I have a lot of cool ideas.CorinneThat's true. VirginiaYou are better at committing. You're a little more loyal.CorinneI am very loyal. Loyal is a nice way of putting what we're seeing here.VirginiaI have more flights of fancy. Perhaps there was a week where I did one minute planks every day. That week did not continue into a second week. I mean, some of it was, I was doing the one minute planks because I was really short on time, and I was trying to get some movement into my day during a busy week or whatever. So I do think they're great for that. And I've just been able to get back into my normal workout routine. So if I've done a good weights workout two days ago. I'm not like, Oh God, I better do a one minute push up today. Like, what? No, it's fine. Learning to do push-ups remains an elusive bucket list goal. Maybe someday. Now is not that time for me and push-ups. No, I'm comfortable. I'm comfortable with my little pulses I can do.CorinneHell yeah.VirginiaMy counter push-ups. That's about it.All right, Fox Family potato chips from Maine. CorinneI mean, now we're getting into the really recent ones.VirginiaSo I assume that's still good. CorinneStill good. I wish I had some right now.VirginiaWhat would make one turn on a high quality potato chip? CorinneYeah. Nothing. VirginiaSpeaking of loyalty. We have values here.CorinnePotato chips.VirginiaFor sure, a core value. CorinneOkay, yours was pressing flowers.VirginiaWell, I mean, I'm not currently pressing flowers, but it's December. There are no flowers to press. But we did press flowers, and I'm very happy to own a flower press.CorinneAre the pressed flowers still present in your life?VirginiaYes! We framed some in little acrylic frames, and they're really cute. They're by my bathroom on a windowsill, and they look very pretty. And I think it's something I will do again, for sure. I'm glad to own a flower press. I don't know that pressing flowers is something one would do, like, weekly. CorinneYeah, no. VirginiaHow frequently are we expected to do it? if I press flowers once a season, I'll feel great about that. CorinneYeah, it seems like a good gardening add-on.VirginiaIt's a nice way to appreciate flowers that don't have good vase life. The really delicate stuff is the best for pressing flowers. Whereas, like, a Dahlia, you actually it's, like, too thick, it's hard to press. Your next one, I think you recommended more than once. I think you recommended it as a Butter on an episode, but then also during a live we talked about it. I feel like I've heard you talk about Taskmaster on more than two occasions. CorinneSo the real question is, when are you going to start watching it? VirginiaWhen am I going to start watching it? I have not watched it yet. CorinneI think one or both of your kids would enjoy it. I think Jack might enjoy it. I think you might enjoy it. It's a great show. It's funny. I endorse it. I know Burnt Toasties are Taskmaster fans.VirginiaWe heard from the people on this one.CorinneI think originally Aubrey Gordon endorsed it, so if you need someone cooler than me to recommend it...VirginiaThere's no one cooler than you. And I am sure Aubrey would agree with me on that, although Aubrey is very cool. You know what I'm going to do? I've been looking for a show the whole household can watch together. Because we don't have a show we can all four watch together super easily due to competing ages and preferences and mostly, opinions about how much you can talk when you're watching a show, which is a question, my children are real polar opposites on. So it can be hard to get them to watch something together, because one of them talks a lot and one of them does not like that. However, this feels like a show where some talking is okay.CorinneIt’s a competition show. But it's really, like, silly. And the season has a little bit of an arc, because it's the same people for 8 or 10 episodes or whatever. It's British. It's your cultural heritage.VirginiaNo, of course, my people. I'm going to try it as a dinner show, and I will report back to you. I'm going to say we have to do it.CorinneI feel like it's maybe PG-13 or something. There are sometimes innuendos.VirginiaAt their father's house, The Simpsons is the dinnertime show. CorinneOh, okay, I think we're okay.You recommended moving stuff around so you're more comfortable. Like moving your desk.VirginiaI moved my desk out from the wall. As you can see, I still have a wonky zoom background because I sit kitty corner in the room now, instead of with my back against a straight wall. And there's so much more room for my body, and I'm really glad I did it. Move furniture if your body does not fit! Okay, we're back to meatballs. Really could be the name of this segment. Instead of Butter, it's Meatballs. And this was your Korean barbecue style meatballs from the New York Times.CorinneThat's a great recipe. And I will say that I made it so much that I am slightly sick of it.VirginiaSo maybe not a long-term Butter?CorinnneIt was a moment in time. I made it for myself a bunch of times. I made it with my mom. My mom made it for my sister. I made it for a friend who I was bringing dinner to. Some friends started making it. It was a good recipe. It has spread throughout my community and and I will not be making it again for a few months probably.VirginiaBut it had legs as a recipe. Meatballs are a great thing to bring people. If you're bringing food to family with a new baby.Corinne Totally. And it's not a meatballs and sauce type recipe. It's just kind of like a, I don't know...meatballs.VirginiaHave some rice with it, or good bread or something.CorinneYeah, exactly. You recommended planting fall bulbs?VirginiaOh, Lord, okay, okay. My Butters are the ones that all fall apart under scrutiny. CorinneHow could this fall apart??VirginiaNo, I recommend it. And I did plant a bunch. However, have some somebody checking your bulb orders and making sure you don't over order beyond the amount of bulbs you can realistically plant. Because I have planted like 300 daffodils, and a bunch of other things. And I still have a whole bunch of tulips and a whole bunch of alliums that have not gotten in the ground, and it is December 3, and we had our first snow yesterday. So I am just looking at the calendar, and I'm like, when am I going to get these in the ground? Like, when is the snow going to melt? I need a rare 50 degree day where I can now get back into it. So this was one where my enthusiasm exceeded my available time and energy. When I've had a Sunday afternoon where I could go plant bulbs, I really just needed to take a nap, and I did that. CorinneCould you hire some help?VirginiaThese are going in my raised beds. So it's literally like, I need to walk out there, dump the bags of bulbs in the raised bed and then dump soil on top. Like, I could hire help for that, but it feels wrong. And the fun part is figuring out the combinations and I want to do it. So I endorse plantnig fall bulbs. But maybe just have a friend on hand to say, do you need to order that many bulbs? Maybe you order a few fewer bulbs? Because you might be tired.CorinneI helped my mom plan some bulbs when I was still in Maine, and minutes after we finished, they were being eaten by squirrels. So yeah.VirginiaThat's another frustration. CorinneSo maybe planting a lot will result in more surviving? VirginiaThat is part of the logic. And tulips tend to be very squirrel--they like them. So you have to have a protected location, which is why they go in my raised beds and I cover them with chicken wire until spring. So I do endorse this. It's a great Butter. But if you're someone who has a little bit of an online shopping problem. You might over order and find yourself in a mess in December. Stay tuned. Maybe I'll get them in the ground this weekend. Somehow. Maybe the snow will melt. We'll see. All right, this is the most recent episode we did. So to be fair, these are recent Butters. Can we say they will be lifetime Butters? We don't know. I, however, do feel confident that this Mayana Chocolate Bar you recommended is going to remain a fave.CorinneI mean, yes, very delicious. And I will say I did order some to my house, and now I'm a little sick of them. VirginiaOh, my lord. CorinneSo maybe my pattern is going all in on Butter, and then it growing old.VirginiaYou go too hard. It's not really the fault of the butter. CorinneNo, and like, I'm sure that we'll still eat all of them.VirginiaBut you hyperfixate. CorinneI bought a bunch, and I have them, and now I'm like, hmmm I also need, like, a different treat. I don't want to only be eating these. VirginiaBut also that seems like a great thing to have on hand when you have guests over, or, if you, like, need to bring a treat to somebody. Now you've got a treat stash. Being the friend who brings good chocolate is a good friend to be. Corinne Hell yeah, yeah. Okay, your red Adidas.VirginiaThey are so comfortable. I wore them for airplane travel, and they were really comfortable walking through airports. I love them. because they are so comfortable. I'm considering getting a pair in a more neutral color palette to have even more versatility with them, because the red goes with most things, but not everything. But yeah, they're really great, and the red is so fun. And I get compliments every time I wear them. And I'm like, I know, Corinne has great taste.CorinneI wanted to get a pair during the Black Friday sale. I would be like, this color, and then it would sell out. And it happened like, three times, and I feel like, now I'm waiting for the refresh. Virginia All right. What do we think of the Butters this year? We had a lot of really good Butters.CorinneI think we had good Butters. I am kind of like, maybe I should have some more crazy whimsical stuff and less, like a television show that is objectively good.VirginiaThat everybody agrees is amazing. You're like, "I also like this Oscar winning movie. Great choice."CorinneMore plastic sun shields and fewer Girls. VirginiaI think you need less safe Butters. Although these were all excellent recs and  you did recommend my two favorite books of the year. So you know, you do have excellent taste in culture for sure. CorinneYou know, you didn't rec any books this year.VirginiaI think it's because we do so many authors on the podcast? So I often don't do books for Butter.I think I do have these little crazes I get into, like I'm tracking my water! I'm doing planks! And I think it's good for everybody to know that if I'm recommending something like that, it might be more of a just for now Butter. But I don't have regrets about either of those. I think it's good. And same with my recommendations for kids, I should try to drill a little more into when I think it's going to be a really durable kid related recommendation.Corinne I mean, kids change and grow so fast.VirginiaIt's so hard to predict. The swing could have been a bust, and instead it's beloved, which is good because it's permanently installed in my ceiling. And, coloring sheets have had their moment in the sun. CorinneWell, should we go out with a Butter? VirginiaLet's go out with a Butter!CorinneI'm going to put mine on right now. VirginiaOh boy. CorinneI'm excited. This could be a sunshield type butter. Maybe don't look. Close your eyes.Virginia I'm closing my eyes. CorinneYou can open them now. I want to recommend: This festive red collar from Connally Goods.VirginiaI feel like you've been wanting one of these for so long!CorinneI really have and I've been like, this is not practical. But I ordered a bunch of stuff from Connally Goods, and I got this, and I have only worn it once. But you know, it really does jazz things up.VirginiaIt's jazzing! You were just in a purple sweatshirt, and now! CorinneI'm in a purple sweatshirt with a bright red frilly collar.VirginiaIt is frilly. It is large. It's not a little collar.CorinneNo, it's substantial. VirginiaIt's definitely Henry the Eighth vibes, like a ruff. I mean, it's not layered, but maybe a pilgrim collar? I'm trying to think, what's being evoked here?CorinneI feel like it's Alice in Wonderland.VirginiaI see that, too. I love it. And you're just throwing it on any outfit.CorinneYeah. I've worn it out into the world once, and it was like, to a friend's house, and I was like, I can't wait for my friends to see this and talk about it.  VirginiaWait and did they?CorinneYeah, they were like, what is that? It's amazing.VirginiaI'm glad they weren't just like, "don't say anything about the collar," because I'm really hoping someone comments.CorinneNo, no, yeah, it's, I mean, you're going to say something about it, I feel like, right? VirginiaYou have talked before about being interested in a bib. We've talked about how we both bibs were more normalized. And this feels like, once you're done with it as a collar, just turn it around, and it's a great bib option. CorinneI wouldn't want to get soup on it, though. VirginiaNo, I understand. I'm saying, like, when you're when you're done, keeping it pristine for collar usage. Just seems very versatile. Goes with everything.CorinneI do like the idea that you can use it to turn a non-collared shirt into something a little more fancy.VirginiaYou can fancy up a lot of garments.CorinneAnd I think they have it in other colors. VirginiaWell, I love it. Great Butter.  CorinneThank you. What's your Butter? VirginiaMy Butter? In light of recent conversation, I will own that this is a Butter of the moment, perhaps unlike your collar.CorinneMy forever collar, yes, definitely.VirginiaBut I'm on a real kick this week with organizing. Like, just one kitchen cupboard, or like one small closet. And I think this is absolutely something I do when I'm stressed, and it is the holidays and life and blah, blah, blah, but it gives me a sense of calm and regulation. This is my sensory swing. Is like, can I just like, solve this one function issue in my house? So a big one is both Jack and my 12 year old love baking. They bake together a lot, but we had all the baking stuff in the kitchen stored between two or three different cabinets. So whenever they baked, it was like, everything comes out, and where does it all get put back and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I had one large cabinet that I was able to empty out, find new homes for that stuff, and then make that the dedicated baking cabinet. And it's so satisfying to my brain. CorinneThat's great. VirginiaI guess this is similar to moving furniture to fit your body. And maybe this will continue. I just don't know that I'll be organizing something every week for the rest of my life. Probably not. But I think if you're feeling a little overwhelmed finding one small space you can tackle can feel really good. CorinneAwesome. VirginiaAll right. Well, this was a delightful episode. Listeners, tell us! Did you try any of our Butters this year? If so, are you still feeling buttery about them or did you too stop tracking your hydration? No judgment, safe space! And if you have new Butters for us, drop them in the comments! 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies!The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today, my conversation is with Rachel Cahill, a longtime anti-hunger policy advocate based in Ohio. Rachel and her team support national and state-level organizations fighting every day to end hunger and poverty in the United States. Most of her work focuses on making SNAP (the government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) the most effective, accessible and equitable program it can be in every community. JICYMI: When the federal government shut down this fall, it closed SNAP for the first time in the history of the program, pausing benefits for much of November. Benefits are up and running again in most places, but this has had major ripple effects on the state of hunger in our country right now. And it's led to a lot of long-term questions about what we do to prevent that ever happening again. Rachel knows more about the ins and outs of SNAP, and anti-hunger advocacy, than anyone I know, so I asked her to come on the podcast to explain what's happening, and what we can do to help fight hunger. We also talk quite a bit about how to give strategically because it is that time of year when a lot of us want to do charitable giving. Which is great! But there are good and less good ways to do that. Burnt Toast is a community of helpers, and I think this conversation will help us all be better at helping. If you enjoy this conversation, a paid subscription is the best way to support our work! Join Burnt Toast! 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 222 TranscriptRachelI am a SNAP advocate. That's how I think of myself. That's my identity. I live in Ohio, and I have been working on SNAP, and the food assistance programs that are connected to SNAP, for almost 20 years. I started working on it in Philly, and have now worked in a number of different states. My passion is to protect our food assistance programs that help families meet their basic needs. If we had something better than SNAP in this country, honestly, I would work on that. But because SNAP reaches 42 million Americans, and it's the best safety net we have, that's the program that I've committed to working on. I do policy, advocacy, administrative, legislative—wherever we can fight for the program, we are doing that.VirginiaIt's incredible. I should disclose that we have a personal connection. I first met you, I guess, 20 years ago? When you were in college, you were a student of my stepmother, Mary Summers, who has also been on the podcast.RachelActually, I was a fresh out of college working in the community at the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger. And Mary had students who she placed with us in a service learning program. Mary was one of my first and still mentors, who has supported me in lots of different ways through this career. And I think you did some interviews with Witnesses to Hunger? I worked on that program many years ago. So yeah, we've evolved a lot, Virginia, since those days.VirginiaYes! When I was researching my first book, The Eating Instinct, you helped connect me with folks for interviews. Rachel and I go way back in a shared advocacy spirit, sort of way so I just wanted to give people that backstory. And so I emailed you a few weeks ago to say, Rachel, help! Please come on the podcast. This was when the government was shut down and it had triggered the freeze on November SNAP benefits. At that point, everybody was scrambling, and I knew you were doing the most scrambling.  Of course, because of politics, the shutdown is now over. SNAP benefits are once again being distributed, for now anyway. But that is not to say that hunger has been solved in this country, or that the 42 million Americans who rely on that program are just totally okay now. You were like, "Do you still want to have this conversation?" And I was like, well, yes, because people are still going hungry! RachelYeah, thanks for the chance to talk about this! In the 20 years I've been working on food stamps, there has never been a moment I remember where SNAP dominated the headlines for two weeks straight. So on the one hand, I'm trying to see the silver lining in this massive drama to say it's a chance to educate everybody, including your listeners, about what the SNAP program is. It has been this quiet backbone program, running and feeding communities for almost 60, years. And during the shutdown, SNAP essentially got used as leverage for both parties to bludgeon each other with and blame each other for starving the citizens of the United States. It's unprecedented. I feel like that's an overused word these days, but this truly has never happened before. SNAP benefits stopped going out across the entire country. And the emergency food system—the food pantries, the soup kitchens, the food banks —was never meant, or equipped, to be able to overnight replace what SNAP is is doing in the community.Just in my home state of Ohio, we're talking about $263 million a month that goes out in SNAP benefits. No fundraiser for a food bank was ever going to come close to replacing that. It was a crisis. It was an absolute crisis that we were facing. So starting on November 1, people's benefits were frozen. They still had to complete renewal paperwork. They still had to comply with work requirements. But people weren't getting their benefits delivered. And then it turned into a Supreme Court battle. It went all the way up to the Supreme Court because the administration actually did have money available that they could have spent, and they were choosing not to spend it on the program that it was dedicated for. So finally, when the shutdown ended, the benefits slowly started flowing again. We're recording this on November 25 and in a few states, all the benefits still have not gone out. So there are still families who are supposed to get their benefits maybe the beginning of November, and are still waiting. The long-term harm of this is hard to overstate. The definition of food insecurity is not knowing where your next meal is going to come from. And we just traumatized 40 million people who did not know where their next meal was going to come from. 40 percent of SNAP recipients are children. Their bodies and brains are going to remember this trauma that they just went through, and it's going to be a long time before we can repair that harm. We need to make sure that this type of a crisis never happens again, and Congress is never in a position where they can hold SNAP benefits hostage, even in a future government shutdown. VirginiaI've been thinking about the juggling act that this triggered for so many families. If you relied on SNAP to cover groceries, that meant you could use other income to cover childcare or pay a utility bill. So we're also going to see folks having fallen behind on other bills. Maybe they're unable to make a car payment, which then impacts their ability to get to work, to get kids to school, so many different things.RachelThere's a saying that poverty charges interest. You might only have gotten $200 from that SNAP benefit, which supplements your work income. But if you're now having to put a bill on a short term loan or credit card and you're paying 20 or 30 percent interest on that because you waited three weeks...How long is it going to take families to dig out of that hole? We hear all the time about utility shut-offs, all the time about evictions that get connected to a small change in household income, including the loss of SNAP benefits. Now I will say, because we have made SNAP such a difficult system to navigate and renew benefits, even if the government never shuts down again, this uncertainty where your benefits disappear, you go to the grocery line to checkout and you find out that your benefits aren't there because of some paperwork mishap—that actually does happen a lot in families' lives. There's a lot we have to do longterm to make this a more stable program for everybody who's experiencing the instability of food insecurity. But this was certainly a crisis moment where it was hitting everybody at the same time.VirginiaSay a little more about that. Because for those of us who are mostly just seeing headlines, it's like, Okay, the government reopened. Okay, the SNAP benefits are back. But this is a system that was already not meeting the need. So what are some other ways SNAP struggles to support families?RachelFirst, let me just remind folks who don't know, if you've never been connected to the program: SNAP is a very modest food benefit. It is on an EBT card, like a little debit card, that is loaded every month with money for groceries. But it's the equivalent of, like, $6 a day on average. It is about as much as most people spend on a cup of coffee. It is not a generous benefit. There's a lot of misconceptions about what SNAP is. It's a very modest benefit you can only use for grocery items. The program—for as great as it is, and it's the best thing we have—has a history of exclusionary policy making. Certain groups have gotten excluded and carved out over time. And HR1, the big bill that passed July 4, really took a sledgehammer to SNAP, too. It cut almost $200 billion out of the program and did some additional exclusionary policy making, the impacts of which we're just starting to feel. So I put the barriers to SNAP in two buckets. There are eligibility barriers, meaning the people that policy makers intentionally exclude from the program. This includes groups like legally present immigrants. It includes people who are forced to prove that they are working over and over again, and if they can't provide the paperwork proving it, then they get kicked out of the program. So there is exclusionary policy making that has to be tackled at a legislative law making level. Then there's all this other stuff, which is most of what I've worked on for 20 years, and what I worked on with Mary twenty years ago. These are the kind of the administrative barriers that people face in tackling the program. Application forms that are 40 pages long, that ask extremely intrusive questions, asking for tons of verification. You have to do a full interview with a case worker, you have to renew your benefits at least every six months. All of these hoops are built up in the program to make people jump through, and that often keeps the folks most in need of benefits from accessing them. Not because they're not eligible, not because they don't need them, but because they just give up when the program is too hard to access. So we do a lot of work at the county and state level, state by state, red, blue, purple states to try to tackle some of those administrative barriers.VirginiaIt is wild that we think people need to work to have the right to buy food. And that we think people need to fill out 40 pages of paperwork just so you can buy groceries this week. RachelIn a number of states that have asset tests, you're asked for bank statements. You're asked for a copy of your rent receipt, your child care bills, how much do you spend on utilities every month? Applying for SNAP is harder than getting a house loan. It's harder than getting a business loan. It's harder than almost anything else, but that is the way the program was built. And there continues to be this persistent stigma or this narrative about unworthiness that has persisted in the program is so disconnected from reality. I'm hoping having this spotlight on SNAP, where we dominated the headlines for two weeks, does give a moment for people to take a second look at the program, really learn about what it is and start to fight for it. If you survey the American people, 90 percent of people, regardless of their political affiliation, will tell you that they think we should be doing more to help people meet their basic needs and pay for groceries, not less. But that doesn't match with what's happening legislatively in Congress. So we need people to know more about this program so that they feel like they have a stake in it. And I guess I just can't stop myself from saying one more thing: SNAP is so critical to our actual economy. One of the things that happened in the beginning of the shutdown is it wasn't just the folks losing that groceries on their table, it was the grocery stores they shop at, which, all of a sudden were saying, We have no customers, because 30 percent of our receipts come from SNAP and no one's shopping right now. I had a local store here in a rural part of Ohio which started laying people off immediately. Because they didn't know when those receipts were going to come in, and they don't have enough of a margin to be able to maintain their store without the program. So if we want our grocery stores to continue to exist and be in all parts of the country, we need SNAP. As that lifeline too.VirginiaWe agree we should be doing more to feed kids. We agree we should be doing more so that people don't go hungry. And yet, the program is built with so many barriers. And that's because there's this way we feel really good about fighting hunger—and it isn't the way that actually fights hunger.RachelI'll say two things to this. Because of the history of exclusionary policy making in SNAP, there is always going to be the need for charitable giving. And there's always going to be, I think, the need for a wraparound system that provides food in real time, today, for anybody who needs it. That's what the best food pantries and soup kitchens provide: No questions asked, walk in the door, get food today. But that doesn't solve the long-term problem. So while we are always going to need that, I think the reason there's this mismatch is this misconception about who benefits from SNAP. So, if you asked those same 90 percent of people who they think the most common person on SNAP is, they would say, "It's a 30 year old in their basement playing video games." It's the same stereotype and tropes about health care, about who benefits from the safety net. There's this misconception that there are people who aren't pulling their weight in society, and that's who's benefiting from these programs. But if you actually look at the programs, most people getting SNAP are elderly, retired, they're people with disabilities, they are children, and they're working parents. They are parents working sometimes two or three jobs, but in low wage work that requires the supplement of a SNAP program. This group of "non-working but capable people" that people imagine are benefiting from the program is a fantasy. And it's intentionally used by politicians who want to attack the program. That goes back to Reagan and before, right? It's a long political strategy that we have in this country. I've been really grateful in my career to see even the food banks and the rest of the charitable sector has come a long way in talking about SNAP as an integral part of feeding the community. Feeding America is a big association of food banks. And they will say: SNAP provides nine meals for every one meal that a food bank can provide. So I think the solution is not to say, "Is it charitable giving or SNAP that solves this problem?" It's actually the blend of the two that's going to make our community's food secure.VirginiaThere's a bit of moralizing, I think, that goes into this. People feel good about giving to a canned food drive, but not necessarily good about voting for policies that would protect SNAP. And with RFK and MAHA taking over the rhetoric around all of this, is that leading to even more policing about what people can spend SNAP benefits on, and what kinds of food we want people to have access to?RachelI'm going to first tackle the voting question. I think that very few people ever vote based on their beliefs or policy preferences around SNAP. I've yet to see a major political campaign where SNAP was a top issue that got talked about. That might change after the shutdown. We did see a lot of politicians on both sides of the aisle come out in defense of SNAP when the shutdown started, and that was, I hope, a jumping off point for people to actually vote. But I think there's this disconnect. I think there's a lot of bipartisan agreement here that we don't see. When you think about folks who are anti-SNAP, if you look at the comment section of an article in the newspaper that's about SNAP, you'll always see online comments that are disparaging SNAP. But if you look one layer under the maybe racism and misogyny that are layered on top--VirginiaHard to look past it, but sure, I'm with you. Comment sections are not my favorite.RachelAgreed. But if you do look past, most people's story is actually about they themselves not getting benefits from the program. So it's often a story of, "I don't like SNAP because when I needed it, I couldn't get it, or because I wasn't able to comply with the work requirement and that wasn't fair," or because I was disabled, or my family member was and couldn't get the help that they needed.So I think that, like so many social compacts in our society, if we actually built the program to help everyone who needed the help from the program, you would see more political support for it. That's why universal programs like Social Security generally benefit from really high public support, because we don't do the kicking people out there. There's not this sense of "if this group gets it, then my group doesn't get it."Some of the realest conversations I've had about SNAP are with families and parents who are just over the income limit and are really upset that they lost access to that benefit once they got a raise or once they got a slightly better job. And that just fundamentally isn't fair. So if we brought in the program and make it more accessible, we would have higher political support for it, I think.All right, on your MAHA question, which I know fits very well with your audience in terms of like you guys track the MAHA stuff.VirginiaWe do. Unfortunately, that has become a core part of our beat.RachelThe great irony of 2025 is that SNAP is one of the single best things we can do to make America healthy again. SNAP has every research study behind it that shows kids who get SNAP as children have higher economic output. They're healthier as adults, they work more. Older adults are less likely to go to the hospital, less likely to go to the nursing home, if they have access to SNAP. The research is abundant, right? VirginiaIt's wild we needed research to prove that feeding people made them healthier, but okay.RachelYes, but we have it. It's rock solid. I spent too many years trying to help those research studies to get published in peer-reviewed journals. We know that to be true. You also have a parallel movement that's been happening for several years, where food banks have been working with insurance companies and other healthcare providers to make sure that they're doing tailored meals, meal boxes for people who are going through cancer treatment, people who have diabetes diagnosis. So these sort of tailored meals continue to be a trend. SNAP is a payer. Medicaid is a payer for those programs, all of those things improve health. MAHA, of course, is not about improving health. You guys know that.It has become is about policing food, right? That is what MAHA is about. And so SNAP was an unfortunately perfect target for MAHA. As soon as we got into legislative sessions. This is at the state level. In January of 2025, we saw a flurry of MAHA-supported bills that would restrict what people could buy with SNAP benefits. In some states, it was soda. In some states, it was candy baked goods. In a state like Iowa, it's literally everything. If it didn't grow on a farm in Iowa. If it's not a vegetable or a legume, it's not in the program. So you've got  these extreme proposals that came out of it was the same two or three lobbyists who came through. They were Casey Means, they were RFK-alliance folks who came through in the state houses. And the only opponents in those hearings were the SNAP advocates. It was the Morris Institute for Justice in Arizona and a couple of brave food banks in some of the red states who saw these bills, and they were there to explain to lawmakers calmly how they have been working, how SNAP supports health, how there are other alternatives. I will say there were some victories. During session in Kentucky, the advocates very effectively educated lawmakers that it would be better to incentivize healthier purchases — because all the research says incentivizing healthier purchases works better than restricting access programs.VirginiaYes. Letting people buy food works better than banning what people can eat. RachelAnd so they actually got a legislator to to come off of a bill that he had supported and to propose a new bill for an incentive-based program. So I think that education work in some political contexts was very successful.But then we saw the White House call governors and said, "Well, you couldn't get this through your legislature, so now you need to do it through an executive order." And that's where we really have seen the most harm done with these proposals that have come straight out of of governors offices under pressure from RFK. I think my long-term view of this is that we are going to have to see the harm done in a handful of states, and see how much of a mess it is for retailers. Still to be determined if retailers sue over these restrictions, which really put all the costs on them to police their grocery lines. I hope what happens is we have, at worst, a couple of states implement these rules, we see the harm done, and we walk it back. And we see that the MAHA thing was a fad that we recover from in SNAP. Because at the end of the day we're talking about a $6 a day benefit. People are not able to meet all of their grocery needs with SNAP, regardless. You may accomplish shifting the order in which people check out. Maybe we'll put all of our fresh, healthy foods at the front of the of the conveyor belt to use our SNAP benefits on, but we're still going to buy our kids the birthday treat that they deserve to have. So it's a big old waste of time, in my opinion. And I hope that it's a fad we are able to move on from in the long run.VirginiaI hope so. MAHA is the worst version of it, but we did have Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle arguing for no soda on SNAP back in the mid-2000s. So it does seem to be this thing that we keep circling back to. And I think it is part and parcel with "it feels good to do food drives, but not to make SNAP more robust." It's this idea that all poor people need is wealthy white people to tell them how to eat, and that will solve hunger.RachelYeah. You are right that that instinct has been there for a long time, and it it probably will outlive it. In a number of states the American Heart Association came out in support of these bills. We had some doctors groups come out in support of these bills. But where they would get stuck—and this is where these proposals quickly fall apart—is how do you define the ingredients of these processed foods. Even, let's say a soda. So you had, in some states, the proposal was, "anything with bubbles is a soda." And therefore you can't buy it with SNAP. But then you have the doctor being like, wait, I did tell my patient to buy the diet soda or the 30 calorie soda. VirginiaAnd what about seltzer!RachelIt's so arbitrary! And if you look at the way that grocery stores label their products, they're by category. They're not by healthy or unhealthy. There is no universal healthy or unhealthy label, as you well know. So it's all well and good when it's moralizing in the hypothetical. But I had to spend a solid four months sitting on a SNAP restrictions work group for the state of Ohio. It was appointed by our governor. And I was in there with industry folks, grocery folks, from health care talking about the nuts and bolts of how to put this into effect in Ohio, which we're going to have to do in the end of 2026. And once you get into the definitions, it falls apart very quickly. So I wish we could go back to focusing on the bigger important things, but I think we're going to have to keep re-educating people every time this wave of this fad, this intention comes around. People need to be reminded that SNAP is there as an economic support to supplement low wages. If we really wanted people to not need SNAP, we need to have a higher wage economy. And that would be a much more straightforward way to solve the problem. VirginiaIt feels very part and parcel with the whole ultra-processed food conversation, which, similarly, when people start defining it, they're like, well, wait, what is ultra processed? What do we mean? It's everything, which then quickly becomes nothing. RachelIt's a distraction. But here we are. We still work.VirginiaOkay, so it's December. This is the biggest month of the year for charitable giving. I think you did a great job of explaining there's a role for food pantries and food bank systems in all of this. But that's not the full solution. How should people think about charitable giving, especially this December, right now, given what we're up against?RachelI love that people are invested in charitable giving at the end of the year. I personally do the same thing, and I try to look at the organizations that are doing the most long-term policy advocacy, because I'm looking at the upstream solutions, and those are often the most under-resourced organizations. You can look at the 990s of organizations. You can look at their overall budgets online and see that your typical food bank, or really any direct service, often has a many millions of dollar budget. But an advocacy organization that's there to change a policy that would help a million people often has a budget of maybe a couple hundred thousand for the year. So when you donate to a policy advocacy organization or a legal aid organization, your donation goes a lot farther and is much higher impact. Because even if you can't give $10,000 and you can only give $200 or $50, you're going to make a really big impact on those smaller organizations' budgets. So that's one place I would think about. This year, I am doing a lot of donations around immigrant support, given the onslaught of what's happening in this country against our immigrant communities. There are a number of organizations, mostly small and sometimes kind of fitting into the mutual aid category, that are trying to provide direct support as well as legal support to immigrant communities right now as they're under attack. So that is what I think, in this moment, is a really good investment. At the same time, the charitable food system is very dependent on donations this time of year too, because lots of people in the community turn to them. They know that they might be able to get a turkey at Thanksgiving. They know they might be able to get a Christmas meal from them. So those are never bad investments. I do think they are very good stewards of the donations and the money that they get. But if you can look a little bit deeper in your community and see where a policy advocacy organization exists—every single one of your states has at least one or two core social justice organizations that would really benefit from donations this time of year.VirginiaAnd I'll just make the point that if you are giving to the local food pantry, think dollars over donations of goods, because they can do a lot more with your money. They can buy in bulk. They know more what their community needs, rather than you assuming that it's something you have in your pantry. That's that's probably like the least impactful way to donate.Rachel100 percent. And a very common mistake that well meaning people make all the time is donating products that are hard to readily consume. Donating a box of mac and cheese, but not the milk and the butter that goes with it. Or a can of beans that needs a can opener. If you're going to do canned goods, make it a pop top because so the people can open it. A lot of times homeless ministries really benefit from those canned soups or whatever, but they need to be accessible without a can opener. So if you are going to do a food drive—I know my kids' school does one, it's a great way for kids to get hands on experience with it being involved— just think through, could this be a meal on its own, rather than, is this going to be something that someone's unable to use without other fresh products?VirginiaLet's talk a little bit about mutual aid. This is something Burnt Toast as a community, we've been just starting to wrap our arms around. We did a very successful Mutual Aid drive at the start of November to help with the benefits shut down, and raised around $11,000 that we were able to distribute to, I think it was 62 folks in our community. So that was great. It's something we want to do more of, and I know a lot of listeners want to do it in their own communities. But there are some things that come up for folks. I've heard people say, "I don't feel comfortable donating to someone I don't know." And some of this, I think, is a little bit of that internalized moralizing stuff that we were talking about, where it's like, am I just giving money to a random person and I don't know what they're using it on? So talk us through your take on mutual aid and some of the concerns you hear coming up around it. RachelI think mutual aid is a beautiful thing that has existed for many, many generation. It hasn't just been in the modern online era.VirginiaRight now, it's a social media hashtag.RachelThat's right, that's right. But it's always been in communities, and you could talk to communities all over the country, and they would say they wrap their arms around folks and share what they have in times of crisis. And that's what the modern era of mutual aid is allowing us to do—but with people who don't live in our physical neighborhood, because we're so segregated as a society. My fundamental belief is that cash is the best way to provide someone with the dignity to make decisions for themselves on what their family needs in that moment. I have no idea whether you need a bus pass or a pack of cigarettes or money for rent or whatever you need to get through that day as a human being. You should have the autonomy to decide what that is. When I started this conversation saying I've worked on SNAP for 20 years, because it's the best thing we have—if we had a robust cash assistance program, I would work on that. There are really nice models in some communities of how to target mutual aid towards groups who are otherwise getting excluded from public benefits and other programs. Here in Ohio, we have a local, organic thing called AMIS, it stands for Americans Making Immigrants Safe. And it's a locally funded cash assistance program for families who are excluded from public benefits. They're seeking asylum, they're working with a lawyer to get their paperwork through. They're stuck waiting on their green card, whatever it may be. And so that is a way that cash can be distributed to folks who are getting excluded from SNAP and excluded from Medicaid. So I really like that program, because there are folks doing the work of the connecting. I don't speak the languages of everybody who needs connecting to that program, and I would never be able to find through Facebook those folks who need that the most. So I think that's a great model. But I also think another really cool model that evolved during the shutdown was an organization called Propel. They have an app that people use to manage their SNAP benefits. And we were talking as the shutdown was looming, and they were like, "What can we do? Should we encourage people to donate to food pantries or whatever?" And I was like, "No, just use your app to give people cash." And they did! They figured out a way to do it. I don't know how many millions of people that they helped, but they were giving a $50 cash payment to the same families who were losing out on their SNAP benefit. So I think that kind of creativity of just saying, "Trust people with $50 in cash and let them decide what they need in this moment." As the giver, you don't own the choice, right? If that person gets ends up buying something that you personally wouldn't spend your money on, that is not on you. And that is not a waste of a donation. That is you just putting goodness into the world and giving somebody else the dignity to decide with themselves what they need in that moment. So that's my take. Get over yourself. Just give people cash.VirginiaYes, yes. Thank you, Rachel. I love that so much. I think it's just a moment when you feel those thoughts coming up, and it's important to pause and say, oh, wait, this is me thinking I know how other people should live when of course we don't. Of course we are not navigating what they are navigating in a day. But we can all imagine how would it feel if whatever our source of comfort, or vice, or coping strategy is, was suddenly inaccessible because somebody was telling you it wasn't good for you. RachelAnd that's the beauty of what mutual aid can do. We do all the other moralizing in our public systems. Families in the child welfare system are heavily scrutinized and penalized. People who are experiencing homelessness are heavily scrutinized. People going through drug treatment, who have had a traffic violation. There are a million other ways we police people in society. We don't need to do that with mutual aid.🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterRachelWell, as a longtime listener, I will say I've gotten great ideas from other people's butter. So thank you for having this segment. Honestly, the thing that brings me the most joy right now is reading Anne of Green Gables to my daughters. We are just about to finish the third book, which is Anne of the Island. And it's, you know, from a million years ago, set in Prince Edward Island in Canada.  I will say what is just cracking me up with each chapter is the way that parents are just as annoying in the early 1900s as they are today. Anne is a school teacher in one of the books, and the things that parents complain about, like my Johnny really deserved an A on that test, are all the same things that our poor teachers have to deal with right now. We have screens in our house. I am not some puritanical Little House on the Prairie mother, but it's the one thing we do before bed is we've been reading Anne of Green Gables. So now we're starting to binge all the different PBS series. There's Anne with an E, Anne of Green Gables. There are redos, there's a 1980s version that's amazing. So all things Anne of Green Gables right now are bringing me joy.VirginiaI'm so rooting for this in my own life. My kids don't take my book recommendations. So there is a copy of Anne of Green Gables sitting in my family room right now that I'm just, like, waiting patiently for someone to discover. If they know I want it too much, it won't happen. So I just leave things like that out. I'm really hoping to join you in this Anne of Green Gables magic soon.RachelYou can mention that Anne is a real troublemaker, that's what got my 10 year old into it. It was when I told her some of the snippets of the ways that Anne breaks rules. Then she was like, oh, all right, maybe I'll try it.VirginiaI love it. My Butter is a really good cookie recipe. It is a vegan chocolate chip cookie recipe, which I was extremely suspicious of—it uses banana instead of egg and peanut butter. But they are so good and chewy and it's so easy to make that I've actually been baking them more than just scooping the store-bought cookie dough, which I will always be a fan of, because the ease is unmatched. But this is a really easy recipe. They're super delicious. I don't think there's anything healthy or special about them, but if you have someone who can’t do eggs or whatever, it's a nice option to have. And this time of year we need a lot of treats.RachelMy daughter's art teacher just told me that she's having a fully vegan Thanksgiving, and I was super impressed with her, and trying to figure out how I could possibly gift her something at the end of year. So I'm going to try your cookie recipe. VirginiaYay! Rachel, this was so helpful and informative. Thank you for everything you're doing. Tell folks, how can we support your work? If we want to learn more, where should we follow you?RachelThank you for having me on. I have been listening to, and learning from you for many years, both on the parenting side, with little picky eaters with your first book, and—oh my gosh, I want to show you my fan girl real quick. I'm sorry. Cut this out of the podcast, if you want. But here is a copy of—I know this is like, not a live video thing where your listeners can see me, but I am holding up Fat Talk. I was a pre-order! Let me show you, and I got it signed by you at your local bookstore. But anyway, I love your books, and I have learned a lot from you over the years. So I just want to say thank you for that. In terms of where you can find me, I mostly hang out on LinkedIn. I lead a consulting team because I don't like real jobs. So we actually do consulting projects for lots of different organizations that are all in the SNAP advocacy space. You can also find us at our website, and learn a little bit more about the advocacy that we're doing and the organizations that we work with. But we are always trying to build more SNAP advocates, whether as a volunteer, as a person with lived experience who wants to go and testify before Congress and talk about why SNAP is important, or just someone who wants to write a check and support organizations. We can always point you in the right direction. So feel free to reach out if you're interested in learning more about SNAP.🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!If you've ever received food assistance, tell us what else people don't understand about SNAP in the comments. And if you'd like to help with ongoing Burnt Toast Mutual Aid efforts, fill out this form. We'll be figuring out our next round of support after the holidays!

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it's time for your December Extra Butter episode.Today we've got a couple of rants and answers to your listener questions. On the agenda: ⭐️ The tyranny of School Spirit Weeks — especially during the holiday season! ⭐️ How it feels to date another fat person 👀🔥⭐️ How we're surviving — even thriving? — this Ozempic Season. To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you do need to be an Extra Butter subscriber.Join us here! 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 222 TranscriptVirginiaOkay, before we dive in, I have a quick rant, which I think the moms listening are really going to feel me on. I would like, Corinne, to quickly rant about school spirit weeks. Because they're really breaking me a little bit this year. Do you know what school spirit weeks are like?CorinneWell, I saw this on our agenda, and I was like, wait, what grade is your oldest child in?VirginiaShe's in seventh grade. CorinneOkay, that is too young for school spirit weeks. VirginiaOhhh Corinne. Corinne. Sweet summer child. School spirit weeks start in preschool. I've been doing this the entire time I've had a child attending any sort of school.CorinneBut that's the whole thing! That’s more work for parents.VirginiaCorrect. School spirit weeks predate a child's cognitive ability to have school spirit.CorinneThat's not fair! Then who is it for? That makes it seem like it's for the teachers. Not that teachers don't deserve to have joyful spirit filled weeks.VirginiaSure, sure, I always want to appreciate the teachers. I don't know that the teachers enjoy it that much either though.CorinneWho is setting this up?The PTA or something?VirginiaThe PTA sets up some of them. Part of the problem in my own school community, is that school spirit weeks come from several different factions, and they don't appear to have ever coordinated their calendars. The elementary student council runs one, so it's a bunch of fifth graders organizing it. So they're jazzed for it! But they're expecting pre-K through fifth grade to participate, which doesn't make sense because the younger kids can't do it themselves. And then the week after they do theirs, we have Red Ribbon Week, which is a drug awareness thing. So there are themes like "it's no sweat to say no to drugs" so wear your sweatpants. CorinneUmm, okay.VirginiaBecause I'm sure wearing sweatpants as children completely prevented both of us from ever trying any drugs of any kind.CorinneI was really thinking I could come up with some great themes for that week. But I shall say nothing more of that here. Not for fifth grade.VirginiaSo the high school does their own thing. The middle school and elementary school are sometimes synced up, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes both my children have a random pajama day, but sometimes only one. They just come at us. Holiday spirit week is coming up this month, but they can't be too "it's Christmas" because they're trying to be non-denominational. But it'll be like, "wear your winter hats!" "wear something with snow on it!" CorinneOh my gosh. Are your kids into it?VirginiaI am fortunate that my kids historically only care about the day they can wear pajamas to school. Of all the themes of the week, that's usually the only one they're really like, "I want pajama day." And if they're allowed to bring a stuffy to school. But I should also note that we may re-up this rant in June because for the final 26 days of the school year, my school does something called the ABC Countdown, where every day is a letter theme, and it's like "B is for beach day, bring your beach towel to school."CorinneWhat?!?VirginiaIt's like all counting down to the end of the year?CorinneWhy are we making school harder? I don't think I ever participated in a Spirit Day, I will say.Virginia I do remember Crazy Hat Day being something I was very passionate about in middle school.CorinneThat does sound like something you would be passionate about.VirginiaBut when they are like, "wear sports team stuff," we don't support sports teams, you know? Despite my recent foray into football, I'm not going to get either my children in an Eagles jersey. That's a non-starter. I don't know sometimes they're low lifts, but even when they're low lifts, it's another thing to remember. And I have so many things in my brain at all times related to my children. I don't need another thing to remember. I also do think, depending on the district and the depending the way it's executed, spirit weeks can be really ableist and classist. There is often pressure to buy special things. If it's a crazy sweater day and you don't happen to be a family that owns a whimsical Christmas sweater, what are you supposed to do? Go buy your kids something? Not to sound like a Scrooge, because this is a December episode, but I'm coming out against all school spirit, period, as a concept, at the moment.CorinneAs a child-free person, I'm with you. I would not be participating. VirginiaMine mostly don't care. So we mostly opt out. But every now and then, there's this last minute, suddenly caring about it and it's so much pressure. So I'm opening the floor up to the listeners on this one. I'm sure there are people who would like to share their own rants. And teachers, I want to know, do you hate it, too? Is it making your job better? In which case I will try harder to participate, because I want your job to be better. CorinneI mean, I'm just imagining having 20 kids at the end of the school year with beach towels. It doesn't sound like it would make teaching easier.VirginiaAnd that's just B day. You've got 24 more to go.CorinneI'm sure 50 percent of kids lose their towels. VirginiaWhat do they even do with the towels once they get to school? It's never been made clear. Well, that's my rant about school spirit week. Now I have one more topic for us to get into before we go to listener questions. I have been struggling with a lot of getting dressed anxiety recently. It seems to have upticked for me. Do you go through periods where it is harder to figure out what to wear than others? How would you say it ebbs and flows for you?CorinneI want to say yes. I feel like there are a few different factors. I think one factor for me, and I assume probably for you, it's usually centered around social events, or if I have to leave the house. VirginiaThe worst. CorinneAnd then the other thing is if I just don't have anything comfortable to wear.VirginiaPants in particular. If the pants are not comfortable, God, it's just the worst. How are you going to make it through the day? CorinneOne thing I've really been leaning into—which is probably a controversial thing to say, as someone who makes part of their living writing about clothes—I've really been leaning into sweatpants.VirginiaBecause we're trying to be drug free, obviously, for Red Ribbon Week.CorinneWhat even what was that? Sweat? No sweat to say no to drugs? It doesn't even make sense.VirginiaIt's actually quite sweaty to say no to drugs sometimes.CorinneI've been leaning into wearing sweatpants out of the house. I have some of the elastic ankle Old Navy sweatpants. And I did Google how do you make sweatpants look less like you're wearing sweatpants?VirginiaOh, and what did you learn? Because this is what I've been working on, too. CorinneI looked at a lot of pictures. One direction you could go is wearing a button down shirt with sweatpants, so you're kind of fancy on top, sweatpants on the bottom. I've seen some fancier shoes with sweatpants. Like a loafer or something. VirginiaOh, interesting. I hadn't thought about that. CorinneAnother direction people go is full athleisure. Like, matching sweatshirt, make it a set. I also saw a lot of people wearing sweatpants with a nice t-shirt and jewelry. Like chunky necklaces, that kind of thing.VirginiaOh, that's fun. This is giving me a lot of good ideas. CorinneYou could definitely search sweatpants outfits on Pinterest or something.VirginiaOkay, this is very helpful.I have realized, for me, 100% of the time, it's not actually about the clothes at all. I won't share too many details, because they aren't my stories to tell. But I'm in a rough parenting season, and I've had some stuff going on. Which is why spirit weeks are especially unhelpful to me. At the moment, there is enough on my plate. CorinneIt is quite full. Yeah. VirginiaAnd in the last two weeks, where it has been very intense, this wardrobe anxiety has spiked so much. One day, it happened right before I was going to get on a Zoom with you! It took me 25 minutes to pick out what to wear. Guys, Corinne does not care. I could show up in my pajama. There is no bar here. CorinneI probably wouldn't even have noticed. VirginiaBut I was trying on everything, and everything felt wrong, and everything felt uncomfortable. And I think this was just where my other stress was landing. But it was really hard to break out of the cycle and recognize that. Part of my brain was getting it. It was like, "Pick a shirt. It doesn't matter. You're getting on Zoom to talk to Corinne." But I couldn't do it. I was totally just spiraling. So the spiral part of my brain was just like, "Should I layer somehow??" So my question is: What do you do when you're in that panic spiral to break out of it? Because logic was not working.CorinneThat is a great question. I'm having so many different thoughts. Next time, you could text me and say, "What should I wear to the Zoom?"VirginiaI mean, that is a great solution to that specific problem. CorinneShould we start doing spirit weeks for Zoom, where we show up to record in our pajamas?VirginiaOr sweatpants, no sweat?CorinneIt's a great question. How do you stop yourself when you're literally spiraling? VirginiaBecause you’re never going to make it better. Trying on three more outfits won't make you like any outfit any better. CorinneI always end up with a pile of stuff on my bed that then I later just scrape onto the floor and into a laundry basket of shame.VirginiaI'm doing that load of shame laundry right now. It's so pointless. But the fact that I did it before talking to you was really clarifying that this is about something else. Because obviously, that's not normally something I stress about. And then, anytime I had to leave the house for even minor stakes, like school pickup or kids' appointment or something where I was going to be visible, it would happen again. And I did stress shop a little bit. I will say, I don't think that's the solution. But I did stress shop, and I did at least specifically target my stress shopping, where I was like, "I am trying to get a very cozy sweatshirt. That is my goal right now". Because, to your point about comfort, I was like, I think if I feel physically cozy and comfortable in what I'm wearing, it will lower my stress a little bit. CorinneYou have also talked in the past about being a real uniform dresser. VirginiaYes. I have a basic cold weather uniform of joggers and a sweater or joggers and a button down. So this is the other reason I knew, okay, it's not about the clothes. Because I already have the uniform. But suddenly the uniform felt completely wrong. And I was like, no, no, this isn't what I should wear. So I don't have answers. I'm just throwing it out there because I bet other folks have experienced this. And it sucks! If this is a place your anxiety goes it just is a really hard thing to break out of. But dressy sweatpants, I think, is, is my uniform. And maybe one other idea is: When I can feel it's going to be a week like that, just decide ahead of time that it's dressy sweatpants every day. This is not the week to try on the jeans that you keep trying to convince yourself work.CorinneThat's probably wise. Maybe if you find yourself spiraling, and it's like, how can you snap yourself out of it? Put on music. Eat something. Or do something else to like, bring you back down to earth. VirginiaI think your idea about texting someone, like texting you, or texting someone else and being like, "I'm in a wardrobe spiral. Tell me what to wear," is really good. Just so people don't worry too much, I have a lot of support. Things are okay. It's just I noticed this was where the anxiety was showing up, and it wasn't a useful place for it to show up. And I thought, hey, it feels sort of like a Burnt Toast topic. All right, should we get into questions?CorinneYes, I'll read the first question. Is it affirming to date another plus size person? I feel like it would be, and it's something I want. VirginiaHell yes. Thumbs up for me. CorinneYeah. I also feel like hell yes. VirginiaI mean, look, mixed weight relationships happen all the time. They're very normal. It is totally fine to be a fat person with a thin person. Fat people are sexy and attractive to all people. So it is not like only other plus size people will find you attractive. But I think there's some comfort and safety and a shared language.CorinneI agree with that. I think part of what has been affirming for me is also just being like, yeah, I am attracted to other fat people. So it makes sense that other people would be attracted to me.VirginiaYes, yes. 100 percent. I completely co-sign that. It's very freeing and fun to realize and explore.  Jack and I call it "hot people problems." Like, you know, if your pants don't fit, you know, leggings fall down a lot. Just all the ways that, fat bodies move through the world and are not accommodated. It's like we have this shorthand joke, like, "whoops, hot people problems."CorinneThat's really sweet. I love that. Like, you knock something over with your butt, and you're like, "hot people problems."VirginiaHot people problems! And I think it's really fun to have someone you spend a lot of time with be someone who really gets that and is in it with you, right?CorinneAnd I love that reframing where you're like, "oh, like, I did something I could be embarrassed of," but instead it's a positive thing.VirginiaIt doesn't feel embarrassing. It's just welp, that's happening again. And I could imagine being with a straight-size partner, even someone who's super affirming, and super into your body, you would still would feel a little more vulnerable sharing some of that stuff. CorinneYeah totally. I mean, I will also say, even if you're both plus size, like, you could still have very different experiences of stuff.VirginiaEveryone has their own stuff with their body and their history of their body. I mean, we answered that question last month about when one person is pursuing weight loss and one person is not, and how to navigate those sorts of things. All of that can still come up. So I don't think it's just "look for someone in a bigger body," but leaning into "you find bigger bodies attractive" is really empowering and great. CorinneTotally agree. VirginiaAll right, I'll ask the next question. How are you both feeling towards the scale and seeing your weight? I'm navigating this in the later stages of recovery. Why do numbers hold so much power over us?CorinneA great question. In some ways, I feel I am the wrong person to answer this, because I feel less activated by seeing my weight. I think part of my own internal work has just been caring less about numbers and letting a number just be a number. Measuring different parts of my body to figure out if clothes will fit, getting weighed at the doctor's office, it's all whatever. But I know that numbers are really hard for a lot of people.VirginiaWould you say there was a time in your life where numbers were a lot harder for you? CorinneMy relationship to weight numbers, at least for a long time, was, like, I actually am not able to control this, you know? Or the effort to control it is insane. So, like, why? I think I also realized early on that different people weighed such different amounts. I remember as maybe a teenager realizing whoa, I weigh a lot more than my mom, but we're the same pant size. Obviously not true anymore. But I don't know, weight is so arbitrary in some ways.VirginiaI think what you're articulating is where most people are trying to get! I think it's a really great place to be, and I'm there a lot of the time, and then I'm not always. And so I'm sort of a middle of the road on this one. I should also say, I've never been in formal recovery from an eating disorder. I think if you're doing that work, this is something to really be working with your therapy team about. So that's sort of a little different than what Corinne and I can share here. But I do think that's the goal. I do think there's a lot of power in letting the numbers have less power. I think where I've been able to make that progress is on clothing sizes. Because just learning the absolute complete lack of science or logic or rhyme or reason to women's clothing sizes is maddening but liberating. I am able to absolutely not care, and have a completely neutral reaction, to whether I'm in the extra large in a line or the 3X in a line or any size. Other than I'm annoyed if I'm in the 3X because I'm like, "well, this is fake size inclusion." But I'm not taking that on personally. Whatever size I'm wearing, I'm just like, oh, okay, that's what this brand is saying. And I think that's hard. I think that did not used to be true for me. And I think a lot of people feel a lot of attachment to clothing sizes and so really learning to just have no reaction to those because they just tell you nothing.CorinneMaybe my not caring now actually comes from weighing myself so much as a younger person. Because I remember seeing how my weight fluctuates over the course of a day. It fluctuates with my period. I won't say numbers, but a thin person could be like, "I just went on a big diet and I lost X amount of pounds," and I'm like, "that's me taking a poop." I could fluctuate that much from morning to lunch time. I don't know. VirginiaEverything you're saying is just gold. It is a lot about just continually reminding yourself of how meaningless these numbers are, how arbitrary and fluctuating they are, and giving yourself permission to step back. And that's just not always the easiest thing to do, depending on your brain chemistry and a lot of other factors. I mean, I will say I'm completely not triggered by having my neck or my calves measured. That is just like, huh okay, that's what that is. CorinneIn some ways, it is useful information to have. And if you can just let it be information, then there's no value attached to it.VirginiaI wrote about weighing myself at the doctor's office out of curiosity a few months ago, and how that then did trigger a spiral, which surprised me. And so I don't want to weigh myself at the doctor's office ever again. So I think it's also worth noting, in which contexts will you feel more vulnerable engaging with these numbers? And that's a very vulnerable context for a lot of us. I am not going to have a scale in my house. I have daughters. I don't think scales are responsible home items, especially if you're a parent. But I do think I would feel more neutral if I were to randomly get on a hotel scale or something. Do you know what I mean? And part of it is, like, is this scale calibrated correctly? Did they put it on carpet and then it actually isn't working at all? CorinneThat's a great point, too. VirginiaThey're not giving you an accurate number most of the time. So I think it's also fine to, just as a protective stance, say, "I don't engage with those numbers." But if you do happen to come across it, remembering that it tells you very little about yourself.CorinneYeah. All right. How are you managing to stay positive in the Ozempic World?VirginiaOh man. Are we staying positive? CorinneI don't know. Before we started recording, we were talking about how both of us, and everyone we know, is holding on by a thread.VirginiaAnd not necessarily about Ozempic, just about life in general, the state of the world, government, etc. It's rough out there. CorinneIt's feeling like a hard time to be alive.VirginiaIt's hard be a human with a body these days. I think I am doing some protective things. I am continuing to curate my social media and unfollow people I need to unfollow. We talked about our love of Bad Skinny Girl TV, but I am mindful of how much skinny person content I consume, if I'm being honest. Especially when I was in the spiral in the last week of not being able to get dressed—because some of that did turn into body criticism. And I'm able to look at that now and be like, that was not useful. It's just a reminder that if you have something else going on, you'll turn it into dumping on your body, because that's what we've been taught to do. I'm doing that Fattify Your Feed series on the newsletter now, because, I want to keep looking at awesome fat people. I want to lean into that, as opposed to the toxic content.CorinneWell, I have been slightly wondering if we're starting to see a kind of Ozempic backlash, because The Cut just published that piece about kind of like GLP1s making life a bit miserable.VirginiaI was really interested they did that—because they certainly published some of the most pro-GLP1 content at the beginning of this whole thing.CorinneYeah, but at this point, the “I'm taking a GLP1” content is boring, because there's been so much of it. So now we've moved on to actually, there's another side to this story. I think we're still in the everyone's getting skinny thing, but.VirginiaI think, too, the more I hear people's stories and understand what goes into the decision for a lot of folks, the more I'm able to a have a lot of compassion for the decision. Very often it's not just "I want to feel better in my clothes," or whatever. Very often it is I need this to access fertility treatment. I need this to be treated fairly in my workplace. All of those sorts of reasons where it's like, you got to do what you got to do to survive and get what you need. So I'm less triggered by people's individual choices around it at this point. It's just like any other pursuit of weight loss—sometimes it makes sense to pursue weight loss, not because I think it's the "best thing" for anyone, but because it feels necessary. And so I'm able to say, well, it's feeling necessary to that person. And I'm glad it's not feeling necessary to me personally, but that's a function of a lot of privilege. I think another thing I want to say—and this is ironic, as someone who writes a newsletter and produces a podcast all about anti-fatness and diet culture—but being less engaged with the conversation is good sometimes. I don't mean be less engaged with our work, but, I've been thinking about it since we did our problematic faves episode. Like, it's okay to just let some of it skate by. CorinneYeah. Well at this point it's like, the Ozempic conversation has been going on pretty hardcore since.... 2023.VirginiaYeah, January 2023. CorinneThat's a long time to be getting mad every time.VirginiaWe're almost three years into it.CorinneI just can't get as enraged anymore.VirginiaAnd the conversation is not changing, right? "Is this killing the body positivity movement? What does it mean to not have food noise?" I'm getting the same interview requests over and over. Journalists don't have any new questions to ask me about it. So there's not a lot of news, or if there is, it's actually old news being repackaged. It doesn't change the core conversation around its role as a weight loss drug . So I think just finding ways to let it be, and stay true to what you want to do.Okay, okay, all right, I'm going to bring us up with the last question, which is a fun one. What is your fav winter holiday tradition and or food.Corinne Love this question. VirginiaI know you love these food tradition type questions.Corinne I love to talk about food. I mean, there's almost so many, it's hard to know where to begin. I feel like the first thing that comes to mind is soup. Aren't you not a big soup fan?VirginiaYou know, I'm reclaiming soup. I'm on a journey. CorinneI love soup so much. VirginiaI'm coming around quite a lot on soup this season in particular. CorinneOkay, great. Soup. As far as holidays go, I feel like my family usually does a big breakfast-y thing on the day of Christmas, and I really enjoy that. Like waffles and grapefruit and stuff. I love that. But I'm really here for all of it.Virginia Yeah, really not turning away any food traditions. I am becoming a soup person. And I realized a lot of that was about letting go of diet culture. I think soup has a very diet-y connotation, and realizing that that it is possible for it to be not remotely diet-y is how I'm able to enjoy it now, with a lot of bread, with a lot of cheese. There are many very non diet-y soup. CorinneCreamy soups. VirginiaCreamy soups! Love it. Probably my favorite Christmas tradition, since my mom is British, we always have crackers on the table. For folks who don't know are these long paper tubes. They're twisted at each end. They have a firecracker thing inside that just makes a bang. And before you start the meal, everybody comes, there's this complicated way you cross your hands, and everybody pulls the crackers together all at once. CorinneWow, that sounds so fun. VirginiaIt's always like herding cats. Like, is everyone ready to come to the table? Can we all hold the crackers? No one can ever remember how to move their hands. And then there are paper crowns inside and a joke, and sometimes little prizes and stuff. It's the tradition that I always felt like, as a kid, and as a British American child, made my Christmas feel special, because my American friends didn't have those. So I really love that my kids have that it's really fun. I think it has become a lot more popular here now. It used to be really hard to find them when I was a kid, and now there are tons of options. So that's probably my favorite holiday tradition. Food-wise, we always do roast lamb for Christmas dinner, which I love, and my mom makes all the cookies. And there are endless Christmas cookies that I love. I realized the other day, I think cookies are my favorite type of dessert. It's tied with brownies, but, I'm much more interested in a cookie than I am in a cake or candy situation. And so a holiday that's really celebrating many types of cookies, I just am like, yes please. CorinneI'm with you. I love cookies.VirginiaI also make a lot of really good pasta sauces this time of year, like the ones that you let simmer for a bunch of hours. It's just comfort food season. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterCorinneShould we do Butter? VirginiaYes, let's do some Butter. I have a pretty good Butter I think. I regularly update folks on what my 12 year old and I are watching for our mother/daughter bonding TV show time, and I have exciting news for the elder millennials, which is: We have begun our journey with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.CorinneI shall now admit that I have never watched.Virginia I had a feeling you might be one of the non-Buffy millennials.CorinneIt's very embarrassing. I don't know. VirginiaIt's okay. Jack has never watched it either.CorinneI don't know why I've never seen it, because it also feels like it's just a cultural reference point.VirginiaWell, and not to tell you your culture, but it's very big in queer culture?CorinneI was going to say. People are constantly like, you know, Buffy, and I'm like, no, I don't.VirginiaWell, it's a very big part of my culture, and it's the show my siblings and I bond over the most, so they're very excited that she's being inducted into it. And she wasn't feeling it for the first few episodes. For any parents starting it with a child of generation alpha or something: They are used to a higher production value. They are used to a crisper television experience. If you're coming from Wednesday and going to Buffy, you're going to be like, wow, the monsters are less scary here. But that's actually great because it also means it's more campy and less scary, which is good for a show we watch in the evening. And Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, was canceled for being a toxic man. So we have to hold that together with it was also a show very much made by women, written by women, and starring women. So I canceled Joss Whedon and keep Buffy is how I'm navigating that one, and we'll be discussing it. But she's in now. She's hooked. We're in season two. It's great.CorinneWell, since you're recommending TV, I'm going to recommend TV, too. I'm going to recommend the show Pluribus, which has just come out on Apple TV. I have only watched three episodes. One of the reasons why I'm recommending it is because it takes place in Albuquerque, which is really fun for me to watch. And it's from the creator of Breaking Bad. So if you enjoyed that, you might enjoy this. It's, it is a little more like sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, but it's raising some interesting theoretical questions. And I feel like if you have enjoyed shows like Severance or The Good Place, you might like it. VirginiaOkay, that sounds really interesting. How's the violence level? Because Breaking Bad got too violent for me.CorinneSo far it's less than Breaking Bad, for sure. It is kind of like a post-apocalyptic thing. So the first episode involves a huge event, but, like, it's not a gory event. VirginiaOkay, that's good to know.CorinneWhereas I'm remembering the first episode of Breaking Bad is pretty gory, I think they're dissolving a person in a bathtub or something disgusting.VirginiaYeah, it starts out hot and by the final season, I was like, I can't, I'm done. I can't do it anymore. I also have a lower threshold than most people for violent content on TV. But that sounds great.This was a great episode! We want to hear your favorite food traditions. We want to hear all the things in the comments. Come chat with us. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies!The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay and it’s time for your Indulgence Gospel — Thanksgiving Edition! We often skip an episode drop on this day, but given how high pressure Thanksgiving can be for food, bodies and people, we thought...maybe you need a little Indulgence Gospel, a little Butter, and a little distraction from whatever your holiday weekend entails?We've got you: A Helen Rosner-inspired fashion epiphany. Thoughts and feelings about Black Friday. A very good Corinne clothing rant.Our secret shame places. And more! You do need to be a paid Just Toast subscriber to listen to this full conversation. Membership starts at just $5 per month! Join Just Toast! Don't want an ongoing commitment? Click "buy for $4!" to listen to just this one. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈This episode may contain affiliate links. Shopping our links is another great way to support Burnt Toast!Episode 221 TranscriptVirginiaOkay friends, buckle up for some good rants. I think this is a nice little Thanksgiving gift, to have a little Burnt Toast in your ears before you deal with whatever this weekend is for you. I hope it's lovely. But it is not always lovely.CorinneShould we take a moment to give thanks for the Burnt Toast listeners?VirginiaObviously. I give thanks for them all the time! We are very grateful for the Burnt Toasties, and very grateful for everyone who made it over here, from Substack to Patreon. We're now about a month and a half into that transition. And we really appreciate you. CorinneEverything is going smoothly.VirginiaSo let's talk about Thanksgiving a little bit. I feel like this is the time of year where I start getting emails that are like, "I've gained weight and I have to see blah, blah, blah relatives who are going to say a shame-y thing about it." Or, "What do I do when I'm at the table and my mom won't stop talking about her diet?" Thanksgiving is such a fraught time because there's so much delicious food, and people who are so weird about the food. CorinneWhen I saw this on the agenda to discuss, I had my own personal panic, because I was like, Oh my God, am I even doing Thanksgiving this year? What is the plan? At this point in my life, I live far away from most of my family. On Thanksgiving, I'm usually stopping by a friend's house, maybe bringing something. So it's pretty low key, and it's been so long since I've actually had to deal with this. VirginiaSo you don't have to do the big extended family thing?CorinneNope. And I want to say: If you don't want to go to your family's house, you don't have to go. I think there is all this pressure to keep doing things the way we've always done them. But you can change the plan. And, you know, Thanksgiving is kind of an effed up holiday.VirginiaWhat with being rooted in genocide. That's always a tough one.CorinneSo if you want to change how things are going, you could stay home and make a personal pan of stuffing, which is possibly what I'm doing. Can't say yet.VirginiaTo be clear, we're not recording this on Thanksgiving Day. By the time you hear it Corinne will know what her plans are. Thanksgiving is not a holiday that I have a lot of emotional connection to, either. My mom is British, so it was less of a focus for her when I was growing up. I don't think the food is delicious all the time, it can be a little bland. I get that people really love their mashed potatoes, and I am not ever here to carb-shame. But that is not my carb of choice. CorinneI love the food. VirginiaI'm with Samin Nosrat, who's always like, "Can it be a little spicier? Can it be more flavorful? Can there be a little more going on here?" Thanksgiving can get a little soft and mushy. Not always. I make an excellent fresh cranberry relish that really zings it all up.But if the way you do Thanksgiving is to always to reopen a bunch of old wounds, or put yourself in front of the firing squad on body toxicity, maybe don't go. Or at least, figure out a plan going into it! Do you have a group chat you can check in with? Can you take your breaks by offering to run out for more ice, or walk the dog? Going to hang out with the kids is often helpful, too. The parents will appreciate that. And if you go be with the kids, then you aren't talking about the politics or whatever the adults are doing.CorinneAnd you can get out some of your rage through running around and screaming.VirginiaDefinitely, yeah. It's tricky, though. And if you're going through it this weekend, we we feel you.CorinneI also would just say, no need to stand on ceremony. If someone's doing something weird, just tell them they're being weird. VirginiaYou're very boundary setting today. I like it. You're very like, Don't go! Tell them they are being weird!CorinneI'm just feeling like we have enough bullshit to deal with right now. If someone is telling you about their diet, just walk away.VirginiaThis is not the conversation we need to be having. CorinneYeah, come on. There's enough hard stuff.VirginiaI will link to things I've written in the past to give more nuanced scripts, if you want that option. But I'm with Corinne. I think we twist ourselves into trying to come up with the perfect response when the reality is—the other person's shitty comment is creating labor for you. So you can just be unavailable for that labor.Alright, let's talk about Black Friday. How do you feel about Black Friday? Corinne is our newsletter universe's resident shopping expert.CorinneI have such mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I love a sale. I feel true excitement receiving all the discount codes. On the other hand, do I need anything? No. On the other hand, will I participate? It seems hard to avoid, you know? VirginiaDo you try to make a list ahead of time? I often try to have a little note on my phone of big ticket items I've been thinking about. So I'll check for a good sale price on these.CorinneThat's smart. I have not done that in the past and maybe I should. I think in the past, a lot of my strategy has been to buy things that I restock. So last year on Black Friday, I bought a ton of my electrolyte drink tablets.VirginiaSure because that's a line item in your budget. Get a good deal if you can.CorinneAnd I think it could be a good time to buy electronics or whatever. Maybe I'll think about making a list. I also think it's a nice time to continue avoiding big box stuff, and choose to buy something from a smaller, local store, which maybe doesn't have the same extreme discount, but probably could really use the business.VirginiaBack when I always sent out holiday photo cards, I would always order those on Black Friday, usually from Minted or Artifact Uprising. All the photo sites have really good sales, so I would lock that in, and then it would mean they would come early enough that I could actually get them in the mail. So they would reach people by Christmas.CorinneWow, that's really smart. VirginiaIt's also a lot of a lot of executive function. And last year I didn't do photo cards, and I felt quite liberated. But also any photo holiday gifts, like, if I'm going to make albums, or get pictures of the kids printed for grandparent gifts, I will take advantage of the sale for that. That's the main thing I usually think to do. And if I've been thinking about a new item of furniture or a new appliance or something, if I start thinking about that in September, October, I'm like, oh, let me sit on that and see what the Black Friday sale is. I never do any in-person shopping for Black Friday, because I can't do crowds. I’m exclusively talking about online.CorinneWhen I used to do Thanksgiving with my family, we did sometimes go to Target or another place. It was very fun to be at Target, which is not normally open at midnight.VirginiaI haven't done that since probably, like, the 90s.  And I don't think I ever did the midnight thing!Corinneit was just kind of a weird, fun, post-eating a lot of food thing, I think. VirginiaI get it! CorinneOne year we bought my mom an iPad, and that was really exciting. VirginiaOh, that's sweet. Speaking of Target, how are all your boycotts going? We haven't checked in about our boycott efforts in a long time.CorinneI was wondering about yours too. My Amazon Prime just expired in September, and I have continued to mostly not shop there. There have been a couple of things. When I was at my mom's, I needed a light bulb that I couldn't find anywhere else online, that I ordered from Amazon. And I did watch The Summer I Turned Pretty on Prime Video. Other than that, I've been avoiding it, and it's been fine. I do have a moment of annoyance sometimes. VirginiaIt creates a little more friction.CorinneI think Target has been a little harder for me, just in terms of clothes. I really miss even just browsing the Target clothes. VirginiaOld Navy is not quite the same. CorinneIt just sometimes feels like not enough variety. I want to be able to look somewhere else. I'm curious: Are people still boycotting Target, or are people still calling for that boycott? I'm not sure.VirginiaI know. I kind of keep hoping someone ends it. because I think their sales did really go down. I've seen some reports. (Here, here and here—which talks about a boycott of Target, Amazon and Home Depot for Black Friday!) So I'm like, did we do it?I will confess to one Target lapse. Okay, two Target lapses. In October, I had the stressful week of preparing for a child's birthday and also preparing to help run our school's Book Fair week, which is a very big, complicated event. And I needed to source party decorations for the child and tablecloths for the book fair. And time was what it was. So Target was how I had to get those things done. I wish I had made other choices, but in the time I had available, with the budget that we had for these things, it is what it was. So that was my one big Target lapse, and I am trying not to get sucked back in.But in terms of my own personal struggles with consumerism, I think it is kind of a good one for me not to have available. I was thinking about my house and how many fast home items I bought at Target over the years— like throw pillows or, oh, I need this candle holder. And I haven't been buying that stuff so much this year, and I don't miss it at all. My house is still cute. It's all fine. I've been going outside the box a little more if I need a home item. So I think that's been good for me to have to step back from.CorinneDamn. That's really powerful. VirginiaAgain, if someone tells us the boycott is over, fully expect to see me with a shopping cart of Hearth & Home throw pillows. Expect a relapse.CorinneOh God. VirginiaAlright, you were telling me before we started recording that you have recently had big feelings about driving pants versus standing up pants. Please explain.CorinneI know this is a thing. People are always like, "These are standing pants, but they're not comfortable to sit in." But I wore Old Navy jeans on my very extended road trip where I'm driving nine hours a day for four days. And I was like, you know, these jeans are pretty comfortable for driving. But then when I would get out at a rest stop, the same jeans were not staying up. I was struggling. VirginiaI do think sometimes sitting in clothes stretches them out of shape for standing.CorinneYes. This is actually why elastic in jeans is so useful. And the jeans that I'm wearing aren't 100% cotton, but I think they're like 98% or something. And I could probably use a little more elastic in these.VirginiaInteresting. CorinneBut also: Is this just a reality of being fat? Where you need separate pants for standing and sitting?VirginiaDo you think it's fatness, or do you think it's just, like... fabric?CorinneI do think when you sit down, your body changes shape. So how do you have clothes that accommodate your body like being different shapes at different times?VirginiaThin people are different shapes when they stand and sit, too.CorinneBut I think they have less dramatic shifts. The bell curve is less or whatever.VirginiaListeners: If you are driving in pants right now, or standing in pants right now, please change positions and tell us how you change shape. CorinneIt's all very relevant for a holiday in which we eat a lot of food, and perhaps change shape.VirginiaWe do need our stretchy pants. And I hear you on this. I often think, "I want to wear those pants later tonight and have them look good, so I can't sit in them all day at work, because they'll get baggy." And then I think, "What a high maintenance item of clothing you are, pants." Why do pants need such coddling from me? So I'm more on the side of, fabric is bad. But I suppose you're right. As fat people, we might be pushing our clothes more. So I think what I'm hearing is those jeans could not thrive in the fast-paced environment you required of them. And that feels like a them problem.CorinneSo is the answer just sweatpants?VirginiaIt usually is. It's what I'm wearing right now. It's what I'm wearing most days. I did just pull out an old pair of Universal Standard the Moro Ponte pant. You remember when I was so into those pants a few years ago?CorinneYes. The Ponti-Ponte.VirginiaAnd I didn't wear them at all last year! I had no interest in them for some reason, and I just pulled them back out, and I was like, yeah, I'm going to wear these. These are good, stretchy, cute looking pants.Corinne That's cool. That's great. VirginiaSo they're back in rotation. But the knees do bag out if I sit in them all day. CorinneSo annoying. VirginiaPants, be better. I mean, that's sort of the mantra of this podcast. Okay, I have another fashion-related matter for us to get into. I have had a real epiphany about what we even mean when we say fashion.And I would like you to look now to your texts for some screenshots I sent you. Helen Rosner is the source material. She posted this in her stories recently, and so we're giving her full credit for this. Because it's really resonating.CorinneYes, I've had this rant for a while about the styling thing, where people are styling this dress, and then they just put on more layers. And I'm like, yeah, that's not realistic. I'm hot. I don't want to style my t-shirt and shorts by adding a sweater. VirginiaAnd it made me realize, a lot of times I struggle with feeling like I've put together "an outfit," and it's because I know I'm going to end up just wearing the tank top, or whatever the base layer of it is. And that's not going to feel like enough of an outfit.CorinneAnd so then how do we style it? I was thinking about this this summer, because of my wedding outfit, which was basically a t-shirt and shorts with a blazer. And I was like, I know at some point I'm taking this blazer off. VirginiaAnd now I'm just in a t-shirt and shorts. But you did have cute pink socks!CorinneYes. I think the answer is socks. Having cute socks. So it's still felt styled, it still felt thoughtful. And you're not going to take your socks off. But if you're wearing pants, can people see your socks? So I think the answer is accessories. I want to think more about what other accessories would be good.VirginiaWell, and I think a corollary to this conversation is Zoom Fashion. Not for our podcast recording, where I'm literally wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt, but when I'm gonna do a Zoom for someone else's podcast or a Patreon meeting or something. And I'm like, "I need to look polished and they can't tell I'm wearing nice pants." It's really hard to get the outfit to convey much when people only see your shoulders. And so then what are you supposed to do? You're supposed to have a lot of fancy blouses for Zooming purposes? That seems weird.CorinneJewelry. You're wearing a necklace right now with a sweatshirt, and it does look like an outfit.VirginiaI am wearing a necklace with a sweatshirt. I always wear this necklace. But yes, that's true.CorinneAlso, glasses. VirginiaThat is true. Glasses, like socks, are unlikely to come off. So that does help.Helen posted some other Stories where she says, “I feel too much of fashion exists only to be photographed on the sidewalk in Nolita. Like, where's the body? Where is life?”. And she talks about how fashion content is all sort of predicated on this lifestyle fantasy of running errands where you're going to be dressed cute to go to a bakery and a bookstore and maybe an art museum. And when is that ever our lives?CorinneTotally. I know. And if I'm having a day where I'm running errands, I'm wearing sweatpants.VirginiaYou need your standing up pants!CorinneThey need to stay up because my wallet is going to be shoved in one pocket, my phone in the other, and that's like two pounds.VirginiaShe says, "The dream of being out and about, browsing in a record store, picking up a paper sleeve of flowers, grabbing a flat white, the dream of engaging in inessential commerce in a walkable city." Like that is just not my life.CorinneAnd like, in a walkable city yet wearing heels or something that you could actually never walk in. Well all of this is why Big Undies exists.VirginiaIt really is. I am now articulating something you are always writing about.To take it one layer further, I think a lot of times this is bound up in when we are feeling aspirational about thinness. I've written about how for me, thinness is sort of bound up with looking like a character in a Nancy Meyers movie. I'm in a great sweater and jeans that do fit both standing and sitting. I'm walking barefoot on the beach. And fashion is just this whole aspirational lifestyle scam, where if you achieve a certain aesthetic you believe that you're going to have the life that matches it. As opposed to saying: What does my life actually involve, and what are the clothes I need to support that actual life? CorinneI don't really have anything to add to that. But I did just want to say that Helen mentions the styling trick of belting a coat. Like, using a regular belt over your trench coat or whatever. How many times have you seen that? And how freaking annoying would that be in real life? Like, you walk into the restaurant, take off your coat, and now you have a belt that you have to carry?VirginiaIt feels like you're undressing in public! Taking off your belt is what you do when you're about to go to the bathroom. So strange. That's very intimate to do in public space. CorinneBut people are like, "Have a baggy coat? Just add a belt!"VirginiaNo. I've never in my life done that. CorinneNever going to. Never would. VirginiaA lot of fashion is just very silly. Which we knew! I just appreciated how Helen distilled it. And I feel like it's useful for me to remember this when I'm going through my little social anxiety spirals about what to wear to things. Because that's often me trying to aspire to a lifestyle rather than dress the body I have and the life I have.CorinneYeah, and think about how much more you're able to actually have conversations and engage in what's happening if you're comfortable.This is a good reminder for Thanksgiving. If you're seeing people you haven't seen in a while.VirginiaAnd if you felt like you had to put a lot of effort into a holiday outfit, which can be a real thing. I mean, related, we were talking in the Burnt Toast chat recently about the pressure of wedding guests dressing. Anytime you have a more formal event, the stress of that can be so much. And I think it's the same thing, because it's requiring you to get out of your comfort zone, and then also to maybe physically wear something that's not comfortable. And it's like, what are we trying to do here?CorinneTotally.VirginiaWell in better fashion news, I want to share that I did just finally find a pair of tall, wide calf boots that fit my calves after doing a significant amount of research. But in not good news, I would like to report that the wide calf boot market is a complete and total sham. Like, it doesn't exist. The brands that claim to do wide calf boots--I am talking about Frye boots, I am talking about Inez, I'm talking about Nordstrom, DSW, all these shoe sites. I went through every one, looking at their boot measurements. And they consider a wide calf boot to be 16.5" inch circumference. CorinneYeah, that's not big enough. VirginiaThat is a straight-size leg! That is not a plus size leg. I am a fat person who doesn't even carry my weight in my legs. That's not the fattest part of me, and the boots that ended up fitting were a Lucky Brand boot that are labeled "extra wide" to have an 18 inch circumference. My calves are like, 17. One is just below 17, and one is just over 17. Also, PS, nobody's calves are the same size. So that was also fun to learn. I went down a real rabbit hole about this. CorinneI think mine are, like, 20?VirginiaWhen I say Lucky's extra wide calf—that's going to fit someone with, like, frankly, a Mid-Sized Queen-size calf.CorinneIf they're tall, how are you wearing them? You're tucking your jeans in or?VirginiaI could tuck jeans in with these. I had given up on that fantasy. And I still don't know that I will do that, because I don't know that I like that look that much for me personally. But I really just wanted them to wear with tights, which would not add a lot of weight. These are actually slightly wider than my calf, so there's room for a sock or something. But mostly, if you wanted room for a sock, forget it. It doesn't exist.CorinneDo they zip up the side?VirginiaThese are pull on. They're just wide enough that I can pull them on. But Lucky makes a wide and an extra wide calf. So go extra wide. The wide calf was like 17 inches. And the thing is, you can't get your exact circumference. If my calf is 17 inches, a 17 inch boot is not going to fit. There's definitely no room for a socks. You need a little give. I knew it would be bad, but I didn't realize it would be this stupidly bad. Knee high boots are really marketed, I would say, to people size 12 and below.CorinneI've heard of people taking boots to the cobbler and having them put in a little elastic insert.VirginiaLike a little gusset type thing.Corinne But also, do we want to do that work? Who has the time?VirginiaWhy is this my new part time job? I have bought boots from Adelante, which is a pricey boot company, but they do custom, so you send them your measurements.CorinneI heard that they are maybe going out of business, but...VirginiaWhen I checked for the particular this boot shopping season, they had an eight week ship time, and I did not have eight weeks to wait on this boot purchase. I needed it sooner, so that wasn't going to work for me. They also only have one tall boot style, which I already own. So I was like, well, that’s not quite what I'm looking for. I was looking something different.CorinneYeah, this is getting into my custom clothing rant. VirginiaYes, yes, please give us that rant. CorinneI've seen a lot of people suggesting brands that make up to like, XYZ size and then custom beyond that. And most of these are brands I haven't tried. So I can't speak universally. And there are some brands that I really like that do this, and so presumably they do a good job. However, I did recently order something custom, and this was from just a very small, one person type of situation. I sent them my measurements, and they made something according to the measurements. And it just didn't fit, right. I got it, and I was like, "I hate this." And I just feel like the suggestion of just wanting fat people to always order custom stuff is... Look, I'm glad the option exists. But it's not always an option. Sometimes you don't have the time. And why should I be ordering custom stuff that then if it doesn't fit I'm in this awkward situation where something has been made, supposedly to my measurements, but I can't use it? VirginiaIs that even returnable? CorinneYeah, probably not. VirginiaBecause if they made it just for you, they can't resell it, right? CorinneIf they're offering custom sizes. It's not going to be fit-tested. They're creating a new pattern, and they don't really know how it's going to work on your body until you put it on.VirginiaSo they'd need you to come in and have it fit to your actual body, not based on a set of numbers, right? CorinneAnd then you're just basically a guinea pig. It iss a good option to have sometimes. It's just not realistic in so many situations. And yeah, the wait time. It's like, you want me to order custom boots that I'm not going to get for two months, at which time winter will be over.VirginiaThis is reminding me, when we were doing Jeans Science, there was a brand, which I'm not going to name because they were very unhappy with me when I talked about this on Instagram. But there was a brand that you sent your measurements to—and their jeans were just nowhere close to fitting my body. Like, I literally wore them for five minutes, and they sagged so much I stepped right out of the pants. They just fell off my body. And she was like, "I don't understand. You sent us your measurements. They should fit."Corinne Like it's your fault somehow. VirginiaI double-checked my measurements. I'm sure I measured myself right, and they don't fit. And I think it's exactly what you're saying. People are not flat. We're not two dimensional. Our bodies change shape when we sit and stand. Just cutting clothes based off a few numbers is not going to work. CorinneRight. Just because you can make a shirt that fits 30 inches pit to pit doesn't mean it will be the right length when I raise up my arm. We're moving around in the world.VirginiaWe're living in our bodies. And the pants need to both sit and stand, drive and walk. We really we need clothes that can do multiple things. I know people who wear petites feel this, too. People are always like, "just get it hemmed!" And that's so much extra labor to take something into the tailor, wait the two or three weeks while they get it hemmed, go back and get it. And then, does it work? Plus not everything can just be hemmed.CorinneSometimes I just don't have the capacity to message someone, "Could you possibly make this for me in a bigger size?" It's just a lot of extra effort, and I'm really annoyed at the suggestion that that is what I should be doing to be shopping in the right way.VirginiaAnd for any straight-sized person listening: Imagine if you wanted to buy something from The Gap, who I'm eternally mad at for not making plus sizes. And they didn't have your size, but they promise they'll make it for you. And so instead of being able to just walk into The Gap and buy a shirt, you have to email them, and wait for a response, and send your measurements, and get out a tape measure, and measure yourself, and make sure it's accurate. And send out that information, and then wait for the thing to arrive, and then it still doesn't. Like, I mean. Straight size people would never!CorinneI can get behind a sort of luxury Made-to-Order thing once in a while, but sometimes you just need a sweater.VirginiaYou just need the thing to fit. Custom cannot be the solution to fashions, lack of size inclusivity. That cannot be the answer. People would not be able to afford clothes and it just isn't sustainable or scale-able.CorinneI think the last thing we were going to talk about was our secret shame spots. VirginiaOh yes, this is a fun one to end on. It started because, in preparation for this episode, I was trying to find something on my desktop of my computer, and I said to Corinne, "I know I look like a person who has my shit together, but if you were to see the desktop of my computer or the inside of my car, you would know my truth."CorinneAnd and I was like, "Oh yeah, my desktop is also like that." I would say my car is not.But you know what one that is crazy for me, is my email inbox. Do you know how many unread messages I have? And I went through this, maybe, like six months ago. I went through, archived everything, started from scratch. I have 16,000 unread messages.VirginiaAnd this is your main email? This is your Gmail?CorinneThis is why people have multiple emails. But at this point it's like, how do I even go back? Like, I can't start fresh.VirginiaWell, I don't know. Because I'm now paying $5 a month for storage for my Yahoo address because it has so many emails in there. But I don't want to have to go in and delete because I'd have to delete thousands of emails. And I only use that email for signing up for stuff. I could just delete the whole thing, but I couldn't figure out how to do that because, of course, Yahoo is far more interested in me paying $5 a month for storage. And so I was like, fine, I'll do this. BBut my Gmail, I keep pretty on top of, because that's my has to be functional email. That said, I also do think I've actually been trying to increase my tolerance for a little more inbox chaos there. Because I think sometimes I can get very perfectionist about the end of the week, trying to clear out to Inbox Zero. I've been a longtime Inbox Zero person, and it's good for me to be like, "Nothing falls apart if I don't answer every email in here," or at least go through and process every email. I think that's how I feel about the desktop and the car too. It's good to have identified areas in your life where you can just be like, "Yeah, that's not where I have it together."Corinne I mean, it's not possible to have everything together all the time. VirginiaAnd I'm not even interested in trying. There are other parts of my life where I care. My house is pretty tidy because I am pretty compulsive about tidying my house. Daily bed maker here. I love a made bed. CorinneWell, can't say the same for myself. But, aspirational.VirginiaI want to hear what other people's secret shame spots are. They don't even have to be shames! Just your places where you're like, "I don't try here." What are your don't try areas? I think that's fun to think about. Especially as we launch into a busy time where we all need areas we don't try too hard in. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterVirginiaOkay, I'm gonna do my new red Adidas, which Corinne influenced me to buy. By which I mean she said, "I found these Adidas, and they are very Virginia-coded, and you should buy them." And I added to cart before she finished that sentence. They are a slight platform. They are bright red with purple stripes and a kind of neon red trim detail. They are super cute and I love them! And you were correct to tell me to purchase them.CorinneHow's the fit?VirginiaThey are so comfy. And I would say, run a smidge big. I go back and forth between a size 7-7.5 And I don't ever want sneakers to feel too tight, because you want to be able to wear socks with them. So I got the 7.5s, and they're roomy—like maybe I could have done the 7. There's definitely room for a sock. Unlike tall boots. I will say — I am still working up my nerve to style them, which is sort of interesting. I mean, I'm wearing them, but a couple things I've put them on with, and then I've been like, "Do I have clown feet?" They're very red. And I love red shoes. I'm surprised at my reaction. They're so cute. I'm wearing them, don't worry.CorinneI feel like they’d be great with jeans.VirginiaYes, here's what is tricky. With a wide leg jean, the jean covers so much of the shoe, you lose some of the cuteness, and then you just see the brown rubber of the platform sole, and that's less cute to me. So if I had a note for Adidas, it might be that the platform sole doesn't need to be brown. It could have also been red, and then I think I'd like them even more. I think it's just that thing where you're like, you have a new thing and it feels like such a statement. See all previous conversations. Virginia, just wear the shoes. CorinneThat's funny. VirginiaThey're pretty adorable. But yeah, what are you thinking? Are you making an Adidas purchase? This is not sponsored by Adidas, by the way.CorinneI have just regular Adidas Sambas that I actually love, and wear a lot, and are kind of like maybe at the approaching the end of their lifetime. So I want to get another pair. I think that I might be sized out of the cute platform ones, because I typically need an 11.5. But there is a men's version that's not quite the same, but very similar, and obviously doesn't come in as fun colors, but I might try those. There are some off-white and navy ones that I thought looked good.VirginiaI mean, I will say the platform is the least interesting thing about them to me. I think the colors are really fun. So if they could just do better colors! CorinneSometimes they have good colors. I feel like you just have to check back. Okay, my Butter is a food product, which I discovered on my road trip. Where was I? I don't know. I was somewhere, and I saw these little delicious-looking candy bars, and I bought one. And now I'm obsessed, and want to order boxes and boxes of them to my house. The brand is Mayana Chocolate. I think the one I liked was, I think it was "coconutty bar," or it was something with coconut in it. But they're really chubby. They're chunky, so they're very satisfying to eat. VirginiaThat sounds yummy.Corinne And now I am wishing I had one with me. So if you see them in a store near you, buy one or stock up. And send me some.VirginiaWell, this was fun. I hope everyone's driving safely and or cooking efficiently. And that you have lovely holiday meals, and nobody says weird things about bodies to you. And we'll see you back here next week! 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies!The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today, my conversation is with Debra Benfield, RDN.Deb is a registered dietitian/nutritionist with 40 years of experience helping people heal their relationship with food, movement and their bodies. Her work sits at the intersection of anti-ageism, body liberation and trauma-informed care, offering a radically compassionate alternative to diet and wellness culture—especially for those in midlife and beyond. After turning 60, Deb began questioning the dominant narratives around aging, vitality and beauty, and quickly realized the majority of resources still centered weight loss and youthful appearance as the ultimate goals. In response, she created what she couldn't find: A framework for nourishing the body that honors body respect, prioritizes liberation and embraces the full spectrum of aging. Deb is the author of the beautiful new book Unapologetic Aging: How to Mend and Nourish Your Relationship with Your Body.  Deb came on the podcast back in 2023 and we had what was really the first, or certainly one of the first, conversations we've had on Burnt Toast about the intersection of ageism and anti-fat bias. That discussion helped lay the foundation for how we're continuing to talk about those issues. Deb is someone I always turn to for resources and wisdom as we're navigating those conversations here. I am so thrilled to have Deb back on the podcast today, to talk about her new book, how diet culture has hijacked the menopause discourse, and why peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are actually giving you all the protein you need.  Unapologetic Aging comes out on December 16, so now is the perfect time to pre-order it as a holiday gift for yourself, your mom, or anyone you know in midlife and beyond! And don't forget that if you've bought Fat Talk from Split Rock Books, you can take 10% off your purchase of Unapologetic Aging there too — just use the code FATTALK at checkout.And if you value this conversation, a paid subscription is the best way to support our work!Join Burnt Toast! 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 220 TranscriptVirginiaWe are here to talk about your new book, Unapologetic Aging, which comes out on December 16. I loved the book. I think it's such a valuable contribution to this whole conversation. It's really a guide to living well in midlife and beyond without, as you put it, "the whole diet and wellness mess." It's also a very powerful reckoning with how our ageism and fatphobia prevent us from doing the things we really want to do at this time. DebI'm trying to create some awareness of our internalized ageism, because I think it goes unnoticed. If anybody is listening to your podcast, my hope is that they've already done quite a bit of work looking at their anti-fat bias. So then it's about looking at where those two meet, as you notice changes in your body. So I created a book that helps you with your awareness and with how you could look at making choices to support yourself and mending some of the body stories you carry about your aging and about changes. That includes being in a larger body, and some pieces around body image and intimacy. Body liberation as you age is such an important legacy for the generations to come. VirginiaI want to start with something I underlined right in the introduction. You wrote that we so often hear “You haven't aged a bit!” And this is considered a grand compliment, right? But you're immediately questioning why. Unpack that for us.DebAgain, hoping that your audience is already aware of how “you look great,” if you lost weight is a problematic thing for someone to hear. It's very similar. It's a very parallel compliment in that you just calcify this belief that looking older is bad and looking younger is always better. That very definite binary that we impose upon ourselves. It is very much like looking thinner is always a victory, and looking larger must mean you're failing in life. VirginiaIt's so interesting when you step back from it. Why do we not want to look like we've been living? Why would I want to look like a younger, less accomplished, less mature person? Not to criticize my younger self—but why wouldn't we want to own the aging that we've done, and the living that we've done? DebWe've just internalized all of this fear. And I get it. I understand that to pass as younger gives you more social collateral, and theoretically you lose relevance in our very ageist culture. So I get it. It's disempowering to say the very least. And it's a perpetual fight. I'm not a fan of fighting my body overall. And I think that's what's at the center of my book: What happens when you stop fighting, and instead befriend, and care for, and lean into the connection and relationship you can have with your body? How beautiful it is, especially at this time in life. There's so much liberation there that I'm very attracted to that for myself and anybody that wants to talk to me about it.Join Burnt Toast! VirginiaI have a kind of funny story to confess. As I was reading your book, a moment came up where I had to recognize, oh, this is my own internalized ageism showing up. The backstory is my boyfriend, Jack is nine years younger than me. So we have an age difference. And he was talking about a friend, and he referred to her as "an older woman." And I realized the person he was talking about was the same age as me, and I immediately was like, "What do you mean older woman? Why are we using the phrase older woman?" And he just looks at me and he's like, "Babe, it's a good thing. That's a neutral description. It's a neutral term." And I was like, oh, I need to reclaim "older" or "old," just like I've reclaimed fat. So now our joke is, if you say older women, you say, "parentheses complimentary," to clarify that it's meant as a good thing. DebWe're just socialized to think “older” is negative.VirginiaObviously you shouldn't even need that parentheses!DebWell, we all do. I do it too. We all do. It was just so deeply, deeply ingrained, just like all the stuff around anti-fat bias.VirginiaI remember last time we talked about language when you were on the podcast. And we were talking about how we like “elder,” but there are other terms that do feel more negatively imbued. So it's not necessarily that you have to reclaim every term around aging, but it is worth looking at why is this term hitting you this way?DebAnd we may be different in the way things land with us, too. I mean, clearly with you and Jack. VirginiaYeah, totally. I was like, Okay, called out for my own ageism. So something you write about quite a few places in the book is this phenomenon of what you call “super agers," which we see constantly on social media. They're always showing up on Good Morning America. Super agers are folks who are over 70 or 80 and still windsurfing or doing yoga or  rock climbing. It's pretty much always some incredible physical feat that someone's doing in their later years. And we have such a tendency to celebrate that, but you're very clear that that's not necessarily a straightforward celebration of aging.DebWhen I was thinking about this, I was also watching the New York City Marathon. And all the celebrations tended to be focused on people with disabilities, older ages. It was very interesting to me. And larger bodies! All of them are grouped together as celebrations because they pushed through some sort of social limitation to accomplish this thing. And again, as always, there is some truth in that. I do have respect for people that work hard to accomplish things. And aging is fascinating in that we become more unique and heterogeneous the older we become. The longer we live, the more experiences we have, the more  possible disease diagnosis and treatments, medications. I mean, so many things happen with each passing year. We're very unique. There are just as many ways to age as there are to live your life. I just want to put forward the fact that you don't have to be in a super human category to be aging well or successfully. It's not unlike when you say “Good Fatty." You're a “Good Fatty," if you work out right, and if you work really hard on your body and being healthy. All the healthism that starts to rise up. So it's very similar with pushing yourself despite your age.VirginiaThere are two layers to it. There's this thing where it's actually quite patronizing to the person doing the activity. Like, oh, good for you. You're doing this despite all the odds. Which you wouldn't say to a thin, able-bodied 25-year-old running a marathon. Then it's, wow, you've worked hard and have skills and experience. And then also it's contributing to this artificially high standard of what we need to aspire to. So now it's not enough to just try to  preserve my mobility as I get older. I also need to be able to do a headstand.DebThe hard part is that, yeah, I do want to celebrate these accomplishments. Of course. I think that's amazing. I saw something about this woman who beat the world record and how long she could hold a plank. And she was about 10 years younger than me, so I immediately got on the floor, of course, to see what I could do. And there are so many little things on social media about tests of your capacity as you age. If you can get up from the floor in a certain way. If you can put on your socks and shoes without sitting down. And what happens, of course, is we judge ourselves, we compare ourselves. And I don't know how helpful that is. I mean, if it motivates you to see if you can shift and change some of your habits, to see if maybe you could work on balance, maybe that's uesful. It's very important to have healthy feet, for example, but to what end? That's what happens for a lot of people. It's like, hell no, I can't do that. I can't do this so why try? A lot of the research on ageism shows that this narrative about decline and fear mongering does not do us any favors when we believe those negative story lines. Fear doesn't motivate us. It makes us feel like we're doomed. And there's actual data showing that we live longer with a much more positive mindset around what it's like to be in an older body. VirginiaIt's making me think of how much we narrow the definition of health when we do this. When we say, Can you get up off the floor without using your hands? That is a sign of how healthy you are. Well, I can't do that every day. That's not something that's available to my body every day now. On the other hand, I recently increased how much weight I'm lifting when I strength train. I can lift a much heavier weight than I could when I was younger and could get up off the floor more easily. And so it's kind of a wash to me, like, which is healthier? And that's setting aside the aging discourse around strength training —we'll get there. I just mean, there are so many different facets of health. And those two examples are just talking about physicality. That's before we get to mental health, or all of the other ways we can measure health. And I just think it's so interesting that we constantly narrow how we define health and how we're grading it.DebWe're so influenced by these “longevity bros.” We're just so, so inundated by those types of messages, especially on social media and podcasts, that it totally narrows our definition of beauty, our definition of  what it is to be well and to live well. One of the things that we need to do at midlife—and I think midlife invites this when you're staying in touch with yourself— is to embrace a reflective period. It's like, okay, I clearly have less time in front of me. What are my values? How do I want to sail the ship? That is something that happens in midlife, and I think it's very important to clarify how you want to spend your time and energy now. And for some people, it is getting up off the floor without using their hands. For a lot of people, not so much. And that's okay.Support our workVirginiaThey are morally neutral activities.Another phrase I underlined in the book, because as soon as you wrote it, I said, Oh God, I'm hearing that everywhere, is people saying, "Well what I've always done isn't working anymore." They're usually referring to how they're eating or how they're moving their body. Like, I always used to do X, Y and Z, and now it's not working anymore. You have such a smart reframe for this. Because was it ever working? DebYes, what do you mean by "working?" Working to fit your body into a certain size and shape, or maybe functionality? Why are we holding onto that? I don't think that serves us very well, because our bodies are supposed to change. I talk a lot about this metaphor of the monkey bars, that in order to move down the monkey bars, you have to let go of one to move to actually move forward. If you cling and grasp, you will stay, and I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in continuing to move forward, whatever that looks like. To evolve and change and become is the beauty of midlife and beyond. That's the opportunity, that's the emergence that is available to us. So this focus on holding on to what's been working, as in, keeping ourselves in the same size dress, or whatever the story is, that's another one of those, like, I can still wear the dress I wore when I went to prom in high school.VirginiaThat's a big achievement. Staying your high school size forever.DebI don't think it's serving us.VirginiaIt's really not. It's really a way of staying stuck, as opposed to letting yourself change. When we fight change, we make it so much harder on ourselves.DebBut the social conversation is maintained. Maintaining that freeze frame--it doesn't make any sense to me. It just doesn't make sense. But I see it and hear it, and people spend a lot of money on it.VirginiaDo you think that wanting to freeze frame is also behind so much of the menopause discourse right now? DebAbsolutely. What I hear in the menopause space is fear mongering about change. And that's getting more and more extreme, in my mind. We are talking to each other right after you've probably seen the very viral conversation about how in menopause, your brain eats itself. Thankfully, there has a lot of pushback on that by people I respect, because there's absolutely no data. It was a rodent study, and the rodents died soon after menopause. So clearly their menopause is not the same as human menopause. But the fear mongering gets people. It just hooks you and makes you feel like you should do whatever this is being sold. But the research does show that our brains change in very interesting ways. As we get older, our brains have more capacity for being flexible and adapting. So that's a beautiful thing. I like celebrating the fact that we find ways to continue to live our lives as fully as we would like to, and age the way we want to age, without all this pressure and fear. Fear, in and of itself, is harmful for your brain, by the way. VirginiaWith the menopause discourse being so loud right now, especially on social media, it feels like all of diet culture is boiling down to two things that we are supposed to do as much as possible: Eat all the protein all the time, and strength train constantly in our weighted vests. The book, I want to be clear, is so much more than that. You have so many great tools, journaling prompts, strategies to help people do this really hard work of figuring out how they want to relate to their bodies and take care of themselves in this life stage. But I do want to get you to give us your hot takes and reframes on protein and strength training, because those are the two that we get the most questions about by far.DebAs most things in this arena, there is some truth. There's a kernel of truth. It's just gone too far. It's gotten too extreme. My preference is to really honor the unique person and their needs, and I also prioritize mental health. If you are a person who has had any history of disordered eating, chronic dieting, obsessive thoughts, anxiety, then the fear mongering is going to be very harmful for you. And triggering. There is research that shows there's an increase in relapse and development of new eating disorders [at this age]. Obsessing over numbers like protein grams is harmful. I don't do it. I don't recommend it for anybody. I think understanding where protein is in our food is smart. You probably already know that. And making choices where you include some protein most of the time is helpful. You don't have to do it every single time you eat. But that is kind of how things naturally happen anyway, without a lot of effort. Unless you're a person who doesn't like protein-containing foods at all—and that can be true—then it may require more effort on your part. My favorite example is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I just love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or peanut butter in anything. I feel like my body goes “thank you” every single time I give myself that. It works. And I've heard that from many clients, too. Pleasure centers light up. You get carbohydrates, fat and protein. It's such a great combo. It's a beautiful food choice, and it lasts forever. You don't have to keep it in the fridge. Another example is a charcuterie board, where you have some cheese, you have some ham if you eat meat. There tends to be a little bit of protein along with the carbohydrate and fat, naturally. So you don't really have to get down in the numbers. I encourage you to pay attention and make choices that include protein. But I think it's completely unnecessary to count the grams of protein.VirginiaI love that the takeaway is eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Yes, done, sold. DebAnybody listening to this and has ever worked with me is probably laughing really hard right now, like, there she goes again. Peanut butter and jelly is my solution to all the things. VirginiaIt's one of the most perfect foods! I had a phase where one of my kids basically lived on Uncrustables, and I was like, no notes. It made packing lunches so easy. We could always have them with us. It was delightful. Join Burnt Toast! DebOkay, strength training.VirginiaLet's do it. DebHere's the thing that I want people to hear me say: No matter what you do, you lose muscle mass. It's not like doing all the things it's going to stop that, because it doesn't. So that's a fact. That's an opportunity for acceptance that your body softens. There's something about that that I find very inviting. I love that my body is softening. I really, truly do. I'm attracted to the softness that's available to me that didn't used to be. I'm naturally kind of like-I don't know if anybody ever watched Popeye? Popeye's girlfriend's name was Olive Oyl, and that was my nickname when I was a kid, because I was just long and lean. So softening is exciting for me. I've never really had this softness, so I think it's sweet. And there's a softening that I'm attracted to around taking the edges off of all of our anxiety and our preoccupation with being perfect. I have a lot of positive associations with softening. There are also some health protective aspects of having more storage space. That's what body fat is. You will be safer when the next virus comes around. We're in that time of the year where we're all going to get this and that virus. So you have more storage and your bones are a little bit more protected. Weighted vests... well that's a huge conversation. VirginiaAs a fat person, I'm already wearing my weighted vest at all times.DebIt's just anti-fat bias that you would need to be as lean as possible and then strap on some extra weight. I'm sorry. It makes me laugh every time I think about it. I'm sorry if people see me laugh when I see them without walking and they are wearing their weighted vests. I'm just entertained. VirginiaAlso, caveat listeners: If any of you are like, no, I just love my weighted vest, we're not taking it away from you!DebI'm not judging you if you're doing it. I totally get that you're just trying to do the right thing for yourself all the time. We all are. It's just, I'm not falling for that one. Weighted vests are on my “I'm not falling for it” list. But yes, we do need to do things that include bearing your body's weight and extra, if that's possible, and of course, the data supporting heavier weight is there—if that's interesting to you, if that's accessible to you. So many women contact me and say, I just feel like I'm not doing it right, because I just can't make myself do heavy lifting. And that's okay, too. Making yourself spend time doing something you hate doesn't feel in my mind like the thing you want to do with this precious part of your life. Because it's more and more precious. I'm in that category. Maybe I'll get to a place that I want to. I'm sure it feels good to feel yourself be powerful and strong. Yes, I get that. I'm a yogi. I love doing yoga poses where I hold my body weight. And I'm also a single mom, so I do a lot of lifting naturally in life. I do all the things around the house.VirginiaI think it's so interesting, because I do enjoy strength training, and I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't genuinely enjoy it. Because for me, the form of exercise that I detest and get caught in this "I need to make myself do it" cycle is cardio. And if they were pushing cardio as hard as they push strength training, I would be a mess. So that's just to underscore—any way you're moving your body that makes sense for you is good. And if you can find joy in it, even better. DebAbsolutely. And feel playful!If you can find some playfulness, and if you can find some social connection, you're also doing things to help your brain and your aging process be with other people. Finding community and finding some playfulness is very, very healthy. VirginiaI love that. DebSo yes, of course I want people to keep moving. But not in this prescribed, "can you hold a plank for three minutes" way. And not in ways that disconnect you. That's probably the biggest thing for me is when you start counting grams, you get disconnected from your body. You get all in your head. When you start judging your body to make sure you're doing it right, you're disconnecting from your body again. Things that keep you connected and in your body are what I'm all about encouraging.VirginiaI love that.Are there any habits or lifestyle practices, or anything that you're like, "well, if people could add on something...?" And I realize I sound like I'm undermining our whole conversation here, because I'm like, "tell us one habit we need to have!" and that's not what you're about. But I'm just curious what you think people benefit from doing more of in midlife? DebMy number one go-to is adequacy. I am very afraid that people are starting with a diet culture mindset which is so inadequate for supporting our bodies. And I notice that the symptoms of being undernourished are exactly the same symptoms that women experience in menopause. Brain fog, fatigue, anxiety, problems with sleep, loss of libido. It’s the exact same list. So I worry that this "blast your belly fat" conversation is contributing to our menopausal experience, peri and post. You are not going to age well if you are living with scarcity and under-nourishing your brain and body. So that's my number one concern, because I hear it so often, and because diet culture has so skewed our perception of what is adequate. I feel like it's a very common experience. Trying to feed yourself throughout the day, trying not to skip, because there's a lot of that going on, a lot of skipping. Because morally, we feel like we are being good and superior thanks to diet culture when we ignore a request for fuel from our body, that little hunger that pops up. And you're going to have more food noise, by the way. I don't know if you want to get into GLP-1s today, probably not.VirginiaI mean, when are we not getting into it? Feel free to throw it in. DebI would not be getting into it if it wasn't so commonly recommended. The new thing now is microdosing for the menopausal changes in your body. I mean, I'm not going to make a bold statement against GLP-1s, because I have many clients that are benefiting, that are in recovery with type 2 diabetes, that are benefiting and doing well. So I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about this facelift plus GLP-1 phenomenon. I believe in bodily autonomy, so I also don't want to diss anybody from making that choice, but discerning what you want from what the social construct is imposing on you requires some time. And that's the other thing that I want people to do in midlife, is to do some checking in with themselves, to get some clarity about what they really want versus what they think they should do. And how can you tell the difference?VirginiaWell I love all of that, and it feels, in so many ways, more doable than counting your protein grams and wearing your weighted vest. I hope people are receiving it that way. And your book is just such a great guide. It's like being in conversation with you. You're just so warm and wise and grounded and gently moving people through what can be heavy work, but there's a lot of joy to it as well.DebYeah, thank you. I tried to create little body breaks, chances for people to just go drink some tea and look at the sky, take a few breaths, because it can be very hard to look at the stories you carry about your body, and do you want to still carry that.🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterDebI am in love with the Samin Nosrat book.VirginiaThe new one?DebYes, Good Things. Well, the old one too, but the new one.VirginiaAnything Samin does, really.DebAbsolutely. I mean, her work is such a beautiful antidote to diet culture. I send people to her Netflix series, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, because it's pure food joy, without a single tiny second of nutrition anxiety. It's so rare to find. It's so rare. But she has this--what does she call it? The roasted vegetable salad matrix? I've  dog-eared that page. I just keep it on my counter, because there are so many cool ideas about mixing and matching, and that's kind of how I cook anyway. It's like, what do I have? What's on sale? Can I do some extra roasting on the weekend when I have time? And what can I throw together as I go through the week? Little bit of crunchy, a little bit of bright acid, little bit of sweet. You can make sure you throw your protein in there, too.VirginiaI haven't gotten all the way through the cookbook yet, but I love it, and I love the way she writes about food, and about giving herself permission to seek pleasure. There's a really lovely essay in there about that.DebAnd not perfection! I mean, she rages against that perfection piece, which I think is so helpful. And try to invite people to join each other. Because the other piece about aging is you want to stay in community as much as you can.VirginiaWell, that leads us perfectly into my Butter, which is last night I had the absolute joy of going into Brooklyn for Kate Baer's book launch event with Joanna Goddard at Books Are Magic. Kate Baer is a phenomenal feminist poet. I probably don't need to introduce her work to anybody. Her new book is called, How About Now? There are so many fantastic poems in it. And just the experience of sitting in—it was actually in a church because Kate draws such a big crowd, they have to have it off-site from the bookstore. So we were in a Unitarian Church, and there were probably at least 300 women, most of us in midlife or beyond, just sitting together to celebrate poems about our lives that make us feel seen. I have goosebumps just thinking about it again the next day. It was really such a gift to be in community with so many women. DebThat sounds amazing. VirginiaKate is such a sweetheart, and I’ve been rooting for her a long time. Yes, now let's talk more about your work. People need to preorder Unapologetic Aging: How to Mend and Nourish Your Relationship with Your Body. It's out December 16. That makes it a fantastic holiday gift for any midlife person and beyond midlife person in your life. What else? How can we find you and support your work? What else can we do? DebWell I have a Substack called Unapologetic Aging and you can find me by my name. I am most commonly found on social media on Instagram, but you can find me anywhere, just by my name, Deb Benfield.VirginiaThank you so much for being here. Deb, DebI just want to say one more thing about purchasing the book. The last time we were together, we talked a lot about grandmothers and mothers and the generations, and I think my book is the perfect gift for your mother, If you're trying to have this conversation. VirginiaI agree with that. All the Burnt Toasties who write to me and say, "What do I do about the thing my mom says?" This is what you do.DebAnd have a conversation. VirginiaAbsolutely. Thank you so much for being here. DebThis was really wonderful. Thanks for having me. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!Support Anti-Diet Journalism!

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it's time for your November Extra Butter episode.Today we're talking about our problematic faves! These are shows, musicians, influencers and other pockets of culture that we want to enjoy without thinking much about them, even if there's discourse. We'll get into: Our favorite Bad Skinny Girl TV shows. The straight man who has Corinne's heart. Is Virginia a pick-me girl now? And so many more!!! To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you do need to be an Extra Butter subscriber. If you haven't joined us yet — we've extended your Burnt Toast gift access deadline! Check your email for "claim your free month by 11/20!" And do it TODAY! Join Extra Butter🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 219 TranscriptCorinneToday, we're going to do a fun little episode where we talk about problematic faves...although it's a little more nuanced than that. This is kind of inspired by a TikTok by Caro Claire Burke. She also has a Substack, and a podcast which we love. Caro says: The inherent flaw of a platform like TikTok, for a cultural critic like me, but also just for anyone, is that you look on someone's feed and you only see the shit they care about. And you get the impression that this person is constantly, chronically online, and that they care about everything. And that makes me feel tired with other people, and it makes me feel really tired with myself. So I thought I would cleanse my feet a little bit by sharing five things I couldn't be bothered to care about, five things where I constantly go, it's not that deep—even though it probably is that deep—as a means of just creating a small sanctuary for myself in a world that is rapidly falling to shit. And her list includes the Skims Merkin, discourse about whether protesting is cringe, her own marriage, and Hailey Bieber.VirginiaInteresting choice for her to put her own marriage on the list. I honestly respect it. CorinneIt's like, if it's working, don't look at it too hard, you know?VirginiaI love this whole concept. I think Caro does great work. But it was a really hard assignment for me! Because we are so chronically online and we care and we dissect everything. I think it's a good exercise though. Not because we don't want to hold problematic people accountable, but because we do get to be people, and sometimes just exist and just let something exist. Okay, so you're like, cringe-ing, a little every time I say problematic fave. Is that just because it's a very overused term, or because you think that's not quite what we're doing?CorinneGood question. I feel like the things on my list aren't necessarily problematic? Or they're not problematic yet, but I don't want to look too deeply into this, you know? I want to let it be something I enjoy, and not have to wrestle with it. I think there's also a way in which we try so hard to do things right with consumerism, like, boycott the right brands and shop for things in the correct way, or hold people accountable. And yes, we should do that. We should try to make the world a better place. And, it's exhausting, and we can't realistically do everything right all the time.VirginiaI think that's really fair. Maybe the other reason these aren't quite problematic faves is we are not naming people or institutions...Oh wait, I might be? But we're trying not to name people or institutions who have a known track record of already being wildly offensive in some way. But we see the potential for them to go in that direction. Now that I said that, there are a couple on my list that are already maybe problematic. So we'll get there. But it's different from being like, "this person is a well established problem, and I just find them delightful anyway." It's more like, oh, this could be a thing, but let's not overthink it right now.  I feel like this is a little like brain break we all need.CorinneOkay, the first one that came to mind for me was TV related. I feel like there's a certain genre of show that I like to watch that is very fluffy, very detached from reality, or at least my reality, and I just like to watch it. So I just can't really get that much into the discourse. And I'm talking about shows like Emily in Paris, And Just Like That, the Sex in the City reboot. I just want to zone out and watch them.VirginiaI mean, we did do a Live all about how bad the final season of And Just Like That, was. CorinneIt's true. VirginiaSo we did contribute to the discourse. And I totally agree with you. We were like, well we're watching it anyway!CorinneAnd now that it has been canceled, I do feel a real loss.VirginiaTurns out I do want to see women in their 50s wearing absolutely absurd outfits and spending far too much money on cocktails. Where else are we going to find that in our lives? My first one is also TV-related and very adjacent. I put down Nobody Wants This, the Kristen Bell, Adam Brody romcom, but this is a whole genre, I think. And Just Like That, Emily in Paris, Nobody Wants This. There are so many! I call them Bad Skinny Girl TV.CorinneOh, wow. I mean, Emily in Paris is absolutely Bad Skinny Girl TV.VirginiaThe thing I have to be mindful of with these shows is, if I watch too many, too constantly, it can trigger some body stuff. That's my one legit flag on these shows. If you look at too many really skinny, pretty Hollywood actresses, sometimes it starts to get into your brain a little. So, you know, be mindful about that. But otherwise, it's like Nobody Wants This...the second season was so dumb. It was so dumb, it was just a retread. CorinneI didn't even know there was a second season. VirginiaMy 12 year old and I just binged it. Kristen Bell plays a just sort of unlikable main character. But because it's Kristen Bell, you're along for the ride regardless. She's being immature and making strange choices and wearing so many odd shirts. I don't really understand who chose the shirts for that show. They always have weird holes in them, or, like, barely cover her torso in some complicated way? And yet I was like, yeah, seems greatCorinneNow that we're saying this. I'm also thinking abotu how I love to watch all the detective, cop, FBI, CIA, MI5 shows. Also extremely problematic. Propaganda for evil forces.VirginiaACAB, except for TV cops? CorinneI know in my heart these are forces for evil. And, like, I love to watch them on TV. VirginiaWe will solve this murder.CorinneI'm rooting for the detective.VirginiaThese shows I'm talking about also often do often have some thinly veiled, or not-so-veiled fatphobia. And I am just, for the most part, able to just sail on through it. I will also put something like Gilmore Girls in this category. There is a valuable cultural discourse around Gilmore Girls. There's a lot about it that doesn't age well. And it will still be a comfort watch for me forever. All right, what's next for you?CorinneAll right. Well, this came up when we were discussing doing this episode. I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna have to really think about what mine are..." And you were like, "Yours is The Gap." And to be clear: The Gap does not make my size. I cannot wear clothes from The Gap. And yet, I'm constantly looking at their website. I like their clothes, and I feel like I've recommended them to you, Virginia, because I'm like, "well if you can wear them, you might as well." Like, I'm not interested in being mad at The Gap for not making my size.VirginiaYou’re like "They get a pass, their advertising is so charming."CorinneI think with The Gap specifically, I have some deep-seated childhood stuff, because The Gap factory outlet was the closest real clothing store to where I grew up. It was just where I just wanted to go. VirginiaIt was the beacon of fashion and culture in 1990s Maine.CorinneBut I do feel like I maybe have this more broadly with clothes where I'm just kind of like, "if they make something and it fits you, you should wear it."VirginiaBecause the options are so slim. And I think I'm always like, "No, I have a responsibility as someone who can wear this brand, because I should be trying to put my money towards the brands that are more size inclusive."And I think that's true, and I'm wearing a pair of Gap jeans while we record this conversation. But I hear you, you're like, "I have nostalgia for this brand. The clothes are cute." Why are you going to waste energy being mad at The Gap for not being better. There are just other hills to die on? But also, Gap, make plus size clothes! Old Navy is doing it. CorinneIt's so dumb. It's truly just boggling.VirginiaYou're the same company. If they can do it, you can do it. I just really believe you can. So I am mad at The Gap, but Corinne is giving them a pass.CorinneWhat else do you have?VirginiaOkay, my next ones are the home design influencers Chris and Julia Marcum. They are @chrislovesjulia on Instagram. To be clear, I've written a think piece about Julia Marcum, so I have applied the discourse to her. And I continue to follow them. And it's weird, because their aesthetic is not my aesthetic. I don't know how familiar you are with their content?CorinneI'm not familiar. I'm only familiar with them because I've heard you mentioned them so many times.VirginiaOkay so quick backstory: The Marcums are Mormon home design influencers. They live in North Carolina now, where they moved for her health from Idaho, which has a complicated backstory. And they have three daughters and a really pretty Bernese mountain dog. Their current home is enormous. The previous home was enormous. They live in these enormous homes, which she's decorating as if they were historic mansions? Her taste is so intense. Just click around at some of the visuals and you'll see what I mean. And it is a hyper level of overconsumption. I experience the ick regularly while looking at her content. I'm like, oh she's already put in a 30 foot long marble kitchen island, what more can she add? And then she does. They just bought a lake house they're going to start renovating that is bigger than most people's homes they live in. It's this just excessive display of wealth and consumerism. And I'm fascinated by it, and have purchased more than one item she has recommended.CorinneBecause it's not a hate follow or hate watch?VirginiaWell, they are a problematic fave. I think they are actively problematic. I think they are representing the peak of influencer culture, where they're constantly pushing Amazon Prime stuff, they're constantly pushing Wayfair, they're constantly rolling out a new product line to sell you. They're very much pushing the idea that your house should be a level of perfect that none of us can actually sustain. That you should always be renovating every room. They renovated their entire living room, and then re-renovated the entire room. Every room is always getting done in this super intense manner. It's bad![Post-recording note: Actually, they painted and decorated their living room, to a degree that most of us would have said was "done." And then fully renovated the same space.]CorinneAnd you look at it and you're like, yeah, I am going to buy that.VirginiaI'm like, it's so cozy. It's not even my taste! I just, I don't know something about it is weirdly soothing.CorinneHow did you discover these people? VirginiaI don't know how I discovered her. I mean, I follow a lot of home design content. I like home design. It's a soothing hobby of mine. But I have realized it's a tricky hobby to have on the Internet, because influencing as a business model makes it always, more and more and more in this way that's tricky. You should see their backyard. They have this outdoor kitchen that could seat 12. It's wild. CorinneThe dream. VirginiaIt's not even! But it is weirdly addictive. CorinneOkay. My next one is Chapell Roan. VirginiaI was going to put her on my list, but I couldn't really think of anything problematic about her! CorinnePeople are constantly getting mad at her on TikTok, I can't even remember why. It's like, she complains, and then people get mad that she's complaining, and I just can't. I'm just like, "Leave her alone."VirginiaYeah, I'm not following that at all. That's not interesting to me.CorinneIt just happens periodically.VirginiaOh, because she did the whole thing about, like, "I'm not going to talk to you if you say hi to me in public?"CorinneThat was one. It's happened a few times. Occasionally she'll get mad about something, or get worked, up about something, and then will post kind of a ranty TikTok, and then people have a big backlash to that, and I just can't. VirginiaOh my god, she's a 26-year-old pop sensation. Just let her be, let her be herself.CorinneI feel the same about Sabrina Carpenter. I like her. Sorry. Everyone hated that album cover. I don't care. I just can't. I wrote a Substack post about it. I don't care. I think the album cover is fine. I like her music. I think she's really cute and funny. VirginiaThere was take after take on the Sabrina Carpenter album. Can we not? CorinneI just love her.VirginiaI mean, this is reminding me of that great chapter in Samantha Irby's most recent book, where she talks about liking something that people think is bad and that she's just like, "Well, I like it." No follow up. And the power of just being like, "Well, I like that bad thing."CorinneDefinitely how I felt about And Just Like That.VirginiaClearly not how I feel about Chris Loves Julia, but maybe it should be? Anyway, yeah, Sabrina Carpenter. Chappell Roan is constantly playing over here. I'm not interested in investigating further. All right, my next one is definitely inspired by this is one of the things that I've taken from the Julia Marcum aesthetic. But it is also its own standalone trend. She's just one of the influencers pushing it, which is porch pumpkins. Are you aware of the porch pumpkins craze? CorinneIs this just like putting a pumpkin on your porch? VirginiaNo, it's putting piles of pumpkins on your porch. CorinneOh, okay, I have seen people do that.VirginiaWait, there was a Wall Street Journal article. I'll find it.CorinneWhen I see people do this, I'm like, I'm tired. I don't have the energy to be stacking pumpkins on my porch.VirginiaAccording to the WSJ, "Families are paying north of $1,000 to create Insta perfect tableaus for porches and yards." CorinneOkay, so how much did you pay for your pumpkin stylist?VirginiaLet me tell you about me and my porch pumpkins. I've been craving this look for a few years, ever since Julia Marcum first posted it. And she bought fake pumpkins, which she just keeps on hand and brings out every year to make her pile of pumpkins. And I was like, well, that's actually a more like responsible way to do it, right? To buy and reuse your pumpkins every year? Except then I priced out her pumpkin collection, and it was like, $800 and I said to my then-husband, like, should I buy all these pumpkins? And he said, no. CorinneAnd that's why you got divorced.VirginiaExactly, yes. No — he was right. But every fall, I'm like, I kind of wish I had that. It looks pretty. I'm not going to spend that money, but it does look cool. So then this year the kids wanted to get pumpkins. And so Jack and I took them to a little local pumpkin patch, and I discovered the trick is to go the Saturday before Halloween. The pumpkins are on deep discount. And I now have 14 pumpkins on my front porch that I spent only $70 on.Corinne14 pumpkins is a lot. VirginiaIt is a lot! They just kept giving us more. I paid $70 for maybe, like, seven pumpkins. And I was still like, well, $10 a pumpkin. We'll feed them to the chickens. Jack's like, I can bake something with this cheese pumpkin. I was like, it's it's fine. And then they were like, here. Take more. Take more. I was like, well, now the pumpkins are basically paying me to be on my porch.CorinneSo funny. VirginiaI think it looks delightful and harvest-y, and I like that. It's a trend that works for both Halloween and Thanksgiving. So you can leave it up for a while. And then you could feed the pumpkins to your chickens, or bake with them, if that was the type of person you were, or throw them in your woods and let the deer eat them, which is what I would also do. CorinneWhen I was at my mom's house in Maine, we did get a pumpkin for her front steps, and it immediately got eaten by squirrels.VirginiaAnother reason to wait until the Saturday before Halloween. So you're not trying to make this trend last all fall. I think it's also like, at this time of year, I'm getting sad about the leaves falling. I'm getting sad about the coming cold, anything that makes me like anything better. It's a pile of pumpkins. They're pretty, that's all.CorinneThey are. The pumpkins in this photo are very beautiful. VirginiaYeah, no, that's the key. You don't just get orange pumpkins, you get the Cinderella pumpkins, the fancy gourds and whatnot.CorinneAnd also, how is this WSJ article/photo, leaving out the fact that there are 14 foot tall skeletons in the background?VirginiaYes, in that photo, they are also doing the very tall skeletons, which is a trend I'm not on because I don't know where to store it. Where does one store the 12-foot skeleton the rest of the year?CorinneI don't know. And those are also like $500, I think.VirginiaThey're not cheap. That's like $2,000 in Halloween decorations just on their porch. It's a commitment. And I didn't go that route, but I just enjoy it. That's all.CorinneDid you put them out and step back and rearrange them? VirginiaI sure did. CorinneOkay, my next one is Tom Colicchio from Top Chef. I love to watch Top Chef. I find Tom Colicchio delightful. Do you watch Top Chef? You don't. VirginiaI know nothing about him. He's a person who exists in the world, is what I know.CorinneHe's a chef. He is a host of Top Chef. He's a little like, tough love, you know? He's very critical. He'll really tell you what's working or not. But he also is a heart of gold, good guy. And I don't want to know if he's a bad person in real life. I find him very lovable. VirginiaYou don't want there to be a scandal.CorinneI'm queer, but I'm very here for Tom Colicchio. He's balding. He's always wearing weird hats and stuff. I just love him.VirginiaThat's adorable. Wait, I have to Google him so I have a face. CorinneHe's not like, a hot guy. At least I don't think so. VirginiaI need to know what man attracts Corinne. Ok, ok I get it.CorinneI would not necessarily say he's my type.VirginiaWell and he's 63, he's a little old for you. CorinneHe is, and I think he's happily married. I just find him lovable.VirginiaWell, I think that's great to just unequivocally love a straight, white man. How often can we say that? That's a good one. All right, between porch pumpkins and Mormon home design people and now what I'm about to say, I am just really outing myself as a bougie suburban mom. It is what it is. But my next one is the Starbucks drive through. I do love the Starbucks drive through. It is not environmentally friendly. It is not a company I feel good about giving dollars to. I do boycott them when people remind me about the boycott. But when I am doing my mom thing, running errands, getting kids to places, the Starbucks in our town is right near where we go for doctor's appointments, and sometimes you need a cake pop or an egg bite to get you through a medical thing. And that's right there with the coffee.CorinneWhen I saw this on the outline, I was like, am I going to admit that I also love the Starbucks drive-through. VirginiaPlease do! Solidarity. CorinneI am going to admit that, and I will say I did boycott them for a while because of the unionization stuff, and my solution to that now has been to go to the Starbucks in my town that is unionized. So I will say you can look up if there's a unionized Starbucks near you. Worth looking into. VirginiaI'm sure there's not. [Post-recording note: But there is in NYC!]CorinneAnd I did just double check and they're not on the BDS list, which I thought they were.VirginiaThat makes me feel a little better.CorinneI know. I love to go to a cool local coffee shop. And then sometimes I just want that sugary stuff. I also never know the sizes. I'm always like, can I have the large and they're like, venti? But I want, like, the tall, sweet, milky drink.VirginiaJack is not a Starbucks guy at all, and does not speak Starbucks. And we went to Starbucks when we were traveling, and my whole family orders all of our complicated drinks. And he's just like, can I just have a black coffee? And they were like, what?CorinneI feel like you can get him into it. VirginiaAll our complicated drinks came out, and they were like, a coffee? Did you say you wanted a black coffee? It took them, like, an hour to just make him a regular. CorinneI know. There’s a whole thing. I feel like fast food restaurants you have to, like, learn how to order from them.VirginiaYou have to speak the lingo. When I'm dealing with my voice stuff, which I periodically am, people can probably hear I'm a little raspy today. The medicine ball at Starbucks, which is an off menu item, is a really good get if you're having a sore throat.CorinneYeah, I will also say they're incredible for traveling. When I'm doing road trips, I'll often go in the morning, because they open at 5 or 6.VirginiaAnd you can get something predictable, like, you know what it's going to be, and you know you can eat their egg sandwich.CorinneI also want to add that I know a lot of them do actually pay better than smaller coffee shops and offer a lot of benefits that small businesses don't or can't.VirginiaI feel that information is both excellent to have, and not in the spirit of this episode. CorinneTrue.VirginiaBecause now you are discoursing Starbucks. CorinneI'm so sorry. I really am. VirginiaIt's okay. I discoursed Julia Marcum quite a bit. It's hard to talk about these things without discourse. I also just want to say drive-throughs in general are such a help to parents or anyone caregiving, because you can get the thing you need and not have to get the kids out of the car. My kids are old and they can get themselves in and out of the car, but in my infant/toddler years, oh man. I was like, Why can't everything be drive through?CorinneAlso for driving cross country with a dog. I don't want to leave her in the car if it's 100 degrees, but I do need to get food. VirginiaI do need to eat! So this is how we do it. So, drive-throughs are bad for the environment and also great sometimes. CorinneOkay, the last one on my list is Lizzo. VirginiaWhoa, problematic fave. Sorry, she is.CorinneI know, but I like her music, and I find her charming and delightful, even when she's talking about diets on podcasts. I'm just like, okay, I feel I can ignore it. VirginiaWell, look. If we're going to look past the flaws of our Bad, Skinny Girl TV, why wouldn't we look past the flaws of Black, fat women, you know what I mean? She deserves the same pass.CorinneThat is how I feel.VirginiaI love her music. My eight year old loves her music because she learned the word bitch from it. And she  likes to use the word bitch, and then be like, "I'm saying it in the Lizzo way, Mama." CorinneOh, that's funny.VirginiaAll right, speaking of my kids, I brought up this whole concept at dinner last night because I was trying to brainstorm my list. And I was like, guys, you have to help me think of my problematic faves. And I said, maybe the Eagles / NFL is a new problematic fave? Which I've gotten into because of Jack. And Jack was immediately like, yep, yep, it's super problematic, and I love it. So Jack's a huge Eagles fan. I've started watching Eagles games with him. I don't know what's happening, but I'm here for the player gossip and the sort of general world of it, which I find interesting. And I'm usually reading a book or doing something else while we're watching, but I like it. And I said at dinner, "Well, it's not like I really understand what's going on with the sport. I just kind of like the atmosphere of it."And my 12 year old goes, "Mama, now you're being a pick me girl!" And I was like, wait, am I? What's a pick me girl? And she said, "You're like, 'I don't know what's going on with the sport. Like, only boys really understand it. But I just like it, I guess.' That's such a pick me girl thing to do. You only like it because your boyfriend does!"CorinneI do think there's a pick me thing about being into sports because boys are into sports.VirginiaWell, I'm 44 and I've never before in my life attempted to like sports at all. And she was like, yeah, that makes it worse. It'd be different if you'd always liked it. Because my dad's side of the family is really into football. She's like, "You never watched it growing up with Granddad." I was like, no, I sure didn't. Wasn't a pick me girl then. CorinneWow. Called out.VirginiaCalled out. Middle schoolers are brutal. I was like,"Does my feminist credibility get me off the hook on this at all?" And the eight-year-old wants me to add that once they understood the concept of a pick me girl, they now co sign that Mama is being a pick me girl about football and no, being a good feminist does not erase that.CorinneGetting ganged up on! I do think sports is a good example of this, though. VirginiaI mean, the NFL is a mess. We were watching a game last week where this guy on the Giants broke his full foot off?! It was terrible. And he's like 20-something, and probably his football career just ended. CorinneThat's really awful.VirginiaAnd Jack told me the NFL is a 501c3, which seems wrong. They make quite a lot of money. I don't think they should be a nonprofit.[Post-recording note: They were actually a 5016b and gave up that status in 2015, but the point still stands.]CorinneYeah, that is confusing. VirginiaNot great. But Eagles does have an Autism Research Foundation, so that's nice. And I've noticed a lot of, a lot of feminist Hollywood people I like, really like the Eagles. Quinta Brunson is a huge Eagles fan. Also, Hannah Einbender from Hacks, said "Go birds" in her Emmy acceptance speech, along with "Free Palestine." And I was like, yep, here for both those things. So a lot of cool people like the Eagles.CorinneThe Eagles do seem like the the team to back.VirginiaThey're like the progressive team. I mean, until they're not, because it's football, and they trade the players around all the time. I don't know. I truly don't understand the sport at all, which apparently, again, is making it worse. CorinneI feel like, eventually you'll start. VirginiaI mean, I can't underscore enough that I did grow up in a football family, and none of it ever penetrated, so I had a lot of chances. I'm enjoying it more now.CorinneI'm into football for the snacks.VirginiaYes, I'm enjoying the food and, the Sunday afternoon ritual of it. On a Sunday afternoon, I just want to lay on the couch and chill. So sure, it could be football. It could be bad skinny girl TV. I'm just letting it wash over me totally and eating good snacks. ButterVirginiaOkay should we switch to non-problematic faves and do some Butter? CorinneYes, absolutely. What's your Butter?VirginiaMy Butter is that it is time to plant your fall bulbs. If you have not done it already. I really recommend everybody do some bulb planting. No matter how nascent of a gardener you are, you can't fuck up bulb planting. Like, get a bag of daffodil bulbs and dig some holes and put, three bulbs in each hole and cover them up. And that's all you have to do. CorinneWow. Maybe I should do that! VirginiaIt's so easy. It's very foolproof gardening. Bulbs are really like, you don't have to water. You just stick them in the ground. It doesn't even matter if you get them right side up, they figure it out underground. They're like, oh, I'm upside down. I'll flip around somehow. I don't know how they do it, but they'll be fine. And then in the spring, you're going to have daffodils, and you're going to be so happy. CorinneThat is a good Butter.VirginiaI try to plant them every year. Last fall I skipped and I regretted it. Critters do eat some, but daffodils are pretty bulletproof. And also alliums, nobody really wants to eat them. So those are my recommendations. Do some bulb planting. CorinneCool. That's a good rec. I'm going to recommend a recipe which is Korean BBQ style meatballs from New York Times Cooking. It's a really good recipe. It's very easy. It's a low lift. It's ground beef, crushed ritz crackers, scallions, soy sauce, garlic. And you basically just mash that all together, make it into little balls and then bake it. And it's very filling and delicious, and goes with any kind of carb-y thing you want to serve it with. I've been eating it with potatoes. VirginiaThis sounds awesome,.CorinneIt's just delicious and satisfying and easy.VirginiaAll right, I want people to tell us what their problematic--I'm sorry I don't have a better term--what their problematic faves are, what their moments of culture where you are unavailable for discourse. You just want to enjoy it. What are yours? Put them in the comments! I feel like we may need to do a master list of delightful favorite things. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies!The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today, my conversation is with Kaila Yu. Kaila is an author based in Los Angeles. Her debut memoir, Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty, came out earlier this fall to a rave review in The New York Times. She's also a luxury travel and culture writer with bylines in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The LA Times, Condé Nast Traveler and many more. Kaila's memoir grapples with her experience growing up Asian and female in a world that has so many stereotypes and expectations about both those things. We talk about the pressure to perform so many different kinds of specific beauty labor, the experience of being objectified sexually —and we really get into how we all navigate the dual reality of hating beauty standards and often feeling safer and happier complying with them. I learned so much from this book, and this conversation with Kaila. Don't forget that if you've bought Fat Talk from Split Rock Books, you can take 10% off your purchase of Fetishized there too — just use the code FATTALK at checkout. And if you value this conversation, a paid subscription is the best way to support our work!Join Burnt Toast! 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Episode 218 TranscriptVirginiaWell, I just couldn't put this book down. Your writing is so powerful. The storytelling is incredible. The research is impeccable. It's just a phenomenal book. You write that from a pretty young age, "I felt the straightest path to empowerment was through courting the white male gaze," which, oof. I felt that. So many women reading can feel that in our bones. And iIn the great New York Times Book Review of your book, the writer asks, "How much can someone be blamed for their choices when those choices are predetermined by one's culture?" I feel like this is what we're always reckoning with at Burnt Toast, and this is what runs through the book: So often, beauty work is a logical survival strategy for us.KailaWe're taught at such a young age that women are just prized for this thing we have absolutely no control over, really. We can get surgery and makeup but beauty is a currency that's depreciating from the moment you receive it, according to the patriarchy. Like, it shouldn't be considered depreciating, but it is.And we learn this from like, Disney movies, right? In the book, I bring up my favorite, which is The Little Mermaid, which, because they recently came out with it again, has had a re-examination. And I think they edited it for current audiences. But The Little Mermaid wasn't unique. That was what every fairy tale was like. The beautiful princess wins a prince at the end, and that's the goal. VirginiaAnd it doesn't matter that she gave up her family, her home, her culture, her body, everything. KailaYeah, she fell in love with him after seeing him one time. And him the same with her, without speaking a word to her, because it doesn't matter.VirginiaIt's purely aesthetic, what we're falling in love with. KailaWhen I was growing up—and it's changed so much since then, luckily—there was just such scarce representations of Asian women. Mostly they were just prostitutes and massage parlor girls on the side, you know? Not even speaking in movies. It wasn't really until Lucy Liu that we got a well-known named actress—and that was way after college for me. So growing up there really just wasn't anyone.VirginiaYou do a great deep dive into Memoirs of a Geisha, which, I'm embarrassed to say--I was a kid when that book came out, and I didn't realize it was written by a white man! I was like, I'm sorry, what?KailaNobody knows this! I've been talking about it, and still to this day, many people are surprised.VirginiaI had no idea. Why did anyone give that book the credence it was given? I mean, it's mind blowing. And you're right. It's a story of child prostitution and exploitation.KailaThat is glamorized. And sadly, it was beautifully written. Like, I loved the book when I was I think in high school, when I first read it. It is just so well done that you kind of just skate over the many, many red flags.VirginiaSo as an Asian teenage girl reading the book, you're thinking, "Oh, I'm seeing myself. This is Asian stories being told. This is powerful." And then, wait, who's telling the story?KailaYeah, we didn't really think about that. I think I knew it was a white guy author, but I was like, "That's okay." Like, at that age, I wasn't really thinking about it. I was like, "Thank you for sharing our story," because I didn't really know any history of geisha either. I thought this was what it was, right? And I was very invisible in high school. So to see these glamorous, beautiful geisha, dressing up in finery and fighting for attention in this seemingly glamorous world was very enticing to me. Because there really were no other examples. Virginiait speaks to the dearth of representation that you were like, "Pkay, finally, they're showing us" and it's this terrible story of a child prostitute.KailaMargaret Cho really said this amazing quote, which I'm going to butcher, and I'm paraphrasing. But she said something like, "Asian actresses are like, 'Hopefully one day I can be the prostitute in a war movie, or hopefully one day I could be the woman that the husband cheats on." And she's like, there's so little representation that we would be glad to hold an umbrella behind a main celebrity, just to be in the picture.VirginiaIt's enraging. Since you mention war movies: I was fascinated by the history you include in the book, tracing the development of Asiaphile culture. And we should probably define that term for listeners, who don't know exactly what an Asiaphile is.Subscribe to never miss an episode!KailaYeah, it's a pretty obscure term that's not used that often. But I use it just because it's an easy, succinct way to say man with an Asian fetish. But I want to specify that I don't think most men who are dating Asian women have an Asian fetish. I do think it's a small vocal minority, but they are very vocal and very online. And they are people who treat Asian women as disposable, replaceable sex objects. VirginiaAnd this is really rooted in colonialism and in US military occupations.KailaI don't think people realize the deep history of that. The origins are probably because when Western men first encountered Asian women, it was in colonialist situations. Whether they were going there to spread Christianity or during American occupations in multiple Asian countries. What's disturbing is that after these young, impressionable soldiers who are like probably barely out of high school, have finished fighting a very traumatic war, they're rewarded by being sent to rest and recreation centers in Thailand or somewhere beachy and nice. Where they found these stations, or clubs, of prostitutes set up specifically for them as a reward.VirginiaIt's skin crawling. That is just a part of our history. That is a thing we did. And I don't think it's well understood, and it completely makes sense then okay, this is how white men first began relating to Asian women. And it has just become more and more entrenched.KailaAnd Thailand is still a hub of sex tourism today. I don't think there's any military occupation there now, but that industry is all from that time period.VirginiaIt's so dark. Okay, so you have the Asiaphile issue. You have this geisha representation of Asian women as sexual objects, disposable. And then on the flip side, there is the stereotype of the Asian woman who's an A student, very cold, the Tiger Mom, the Lucy Liu sort of characters. Which is also really problematic and narrow. And those are your options. KailaYes, yes. I fell into that model minority stereotype, which is exists because I think Asian parents immigrate here to give their children a better life, so they're very strict. My parents, at least, were very strict and expected excellence in school and obedience to parents. And so I was very shy and very studious and all of those things. And I found my social life very lacking in that way. And I did not like being a model minority student. Because that nerdy Asian stereotype was represented on TV at the time in very terrible ways, with the Revenge Of The Nerds guy, or with the Sixteen Candles Asian guy. Super cringy versions. You don't want to be associated with that at all, as a young person. So I really swung the other way, aggressively rebelling like some other people might not have. Most people, most Asians, didn't rebel as much as I did, but I just really, really rebelled against that stereotype.VirginiaI mean, it's so understandable. It's not remotely empowering. Even with some of Lucy Liu's characters where she's playing like a "powerful" woman, it's a very narrow form of power.KailaYes, and it's sexualized. Always.VirginiaSo it makes sense that as a kid, you're like, "Well, I don't want to be in this box. I guess I'll go over here." And it just shows how few choices we give girls in general, but especially Asian girls. You've always got to pick a lane in a way that doesn't let you just be human.KailaIt's robbing women of multi-faceted humanity.VirginiaSo you were like, okay, I'm not going to be the model A student. Tell a little of where you went next.KailaWhen I was in high school, there weren't any Asian female role models that were useful. And then the internet started. So then I was surfing around online, and I discovered that there were dozens or even hundreds of websites dedicated to this one Asian model named Sung Hi Lee. And I became really obsessed with her, because I'd never seen so many non-Asians and Asian guys be fans of an Asian woman, period. And she was so beautiful and stunning. But she was a Playboy model, so she was very, very highly sexualized. And I spent many years being a fan of hers. And then I started to aspire to want to be like her, because it just seemed like she had everything I didn't. And then eventually, when I got to college, I started to pursue pinup modeling, and then that eventually went into import modeling, which is very niche Asian car shows that ultimately inspired Fast and Furious. But it was not really known out of the import or Asian community.VirginiaAnd were there parts of the work that were validating and enjoyable? Or was it always sort of this feeling of I'm trying to play a role, I'm trying to be something that other people want from me?KailaI say that at first, it felt like love. I couldn't explain it at the time, but like looking back, I had such a lack of self-love from the beginning. I think I was just maybe born that way, or built that way. That attention, after feeling so invisible in high school, felt like so deeply validating. But it's just such a temporary hit. And then there are all these girls coming up behind you and you're being pitted against each other. So it's like a cocaine high, you know? It's lasts a day or two, and then you're chasing the next thing. So it wasn't at all fulfilling. VirginiaAnd you become increasingly aware of all you need to do in terms of your own body appearance in order to keep being the girl that they want for this. KailaI mean, before I even started pursuing import modeling, I got breast implants, which are still really huge now today, but this was the era where Baywatch was massive, and Pamela Anderson was the ideal. And I was completely flat chested, so I was like I don't feel completely feminine. Even Sung Hi Li, that model I looked up to, had breast implants. So the complicated thing is that I don't regret the breast implants. I like them. But I wish we didn't live in a society where we have to get surgeries to feel better about ourselves, right?Join Burnt Toast! VirginiaYou wish it could be a choice that you made on your own terms, and not in response to this feeling of lacking something.KailaBut I definitely felt lacking in that arena. So that was the mindset behind the surgery. Then in the book I talk about—and this is a little bit timely now, because I don't know if you saw the Love Island controversy. This happened in the last season of Love Island, Cierra Ortega, who was a big contestant who made it near the end, got kicked off the show because she had made some comments about her eyes, calling them the C word, which is a slur referring to Chinese eyes. And she was basically saying, oh, my eyes look too Asian. I'm going to get them Botoxed so they're wider or whatever. I think Asians learned that many people didn't realize that that word is considered a slur, and then especially how she was using it, because she was saying she didn't like how her eyes looked.VirginiaBut no producer on the show knew that it was a slur?KailaShe didn't say it on the show. It resurfaced. You know how fans go back. So she ended up getting booted off the show. And I don't believe in cancel culture and all of that, but I thought it was important for people to know that Asians do consider that a slur. VirginiaIt's important for everyone to understand. KailaBut I myself got that eye surgery. There's a surgery called double eyelid surgery, which is probably the most popular surgery amongst Asians, at least East Asians, and it was popularized in South Korea, I believe, during the wartime by this white doctor named Dr Ralph Millard, who was trying to make prostitutes' eyes look better for military men or for wives to look better for the military men who were bringing them back home. And then in medical journals, he described the Asian eye as dull and listless and unemotional. I wasn't trying to get my eyes lifted to look more white, and I think most Asian girls like me aren't. In Asia, bigger eyes are just considered more attractive. But it's important to know that the surgery originated from someone who had racist comments to make about the Asian eye.VirginiaAnother gift from white men. They really have done so much for us. I had Elise Hu on the podcast when Flawless came out, her book about the Korean beauty industry, which is fascinating. It was really interesting for me to learn that these standards also are part of Asian culture. And it's not necessarily about seeking whiteness. It's also just a longheld beauty standard within the culture—but then fueled by racist white doctors developing surgeries and what not. And that that kind of push pull is really interesting to me, that it's a both/and.KailaBut then I wonder, as we're speaking, is that beauty standard ultimately Western? To have bigger eyes? I don't know. I haven't done enough research on that to comment on it at all, but that's a question that just popped into my head. Listen to Virginia and Elise Hu!Virginia I think what your book explores, and what you're talking about, is how we lose touch with the origin stories of these standards, but the standards feel so important to achieve all the same. And I think that's what we see over and over in beauty culture. We get conditioned and normalized to needing this body part to look this way. And we usually don't unpack why we've decided that's so important. And then when you do look at the origins, they're always very dark and racist.KailaWe've just seen it in this generation when we were growing up Paris Hilton was the body type choice, and then it was Kim Kardashian. Neither body is really that achievable? VirginiaNo, definitely not. KailaAnd so it swung and you couldn't fit into either one. And then now it's back. So yeah, there's no way of winning that.VirginiaSpeaking of bodies, I wanted to ask you how you see anti-fatness, which is, of course, the beauty bias that we talk about the most on Burnt Toast, intersecting with and upholding anti-Asian racism.KailaIt's always a joke, when you go back to your family of origin, they're like, "Oh, you gained weight!" That's always what they'll say to criticize you.But it's crazy. I was skinny when I was 25 and I got hired to do a movie in Beijing. And then when I got there, the skinny standards in Asia are scary. And I met the director, and then the next day, I got fired because he told my agent, like, oh, she's heavier than we thought. But I was not at all, I was skinnier than I am now. So, yeah, I do feel the beauty standards and weight standards in Asia are super, super toxic. I wouldn't want to be a woman in East Asia. It's even worse, I think, than being a woman in Western cultures. Between the youthfulness and weight standards, it's it's a lot tougher than here, I think.VirginiaWas managing your weight something you were thinking about during those years as well? Like that was also part of achieving this look?KailaYes, definitely, weight was always a concern with that kind of East Asian expectation in place. I will be very transparent to say that I was doing a lot of cocaine at the time so that made it less of an issue, just because not eating is a symptom of a lot of cocaine.VirginiaYeah, that's a whole other piece. I think you write about addiction really beautifully in the memoir as well. And I super appreciated that component of it. KailaWhen I started using substances and alcohol, it just, like, again, felt like a form of love. The first time I did ecstasy. I mean, a lot of people do describe ecstasy as feeling like love, and I think for someone so lacking in it, it was just maybe more deeply fulfilling than for the next person.VirginiaI mean, as we were saying, working as an import model, it's so validating. It feels like love, and then it's over, and then you're not quite good enough, and you're competing against other girls. And then here's this other way to get the feeling. It just all makes sense that it would all fit together. How were your relationships with other women during this time? With the competition so cutthroat, and particularly the pressure on Asian women, that can create so much toxicity and competition. KailaI think it was very well-reflected and illustrated for me in Memoirs of a Geisha. Because that's very much a story of how this very young girl comes into the industry and takes down this older geisha, like the most famous geisha in all of the area is taken down by this much younger girl. And from the minute the younger girl enters the scene, this older geisha is threatened because she knows she's there to take her place. And it probably happened to another geisha before her, you know? But, the thing with me is, I've always been a girl's girl. So I've always had my group of friends, and that's really helped temper some of the situations. I think I always felt very threatened in the import industry, because I felt I made it there because when I set my mind on something, I'll knock down the door to get in. But some of the girls were there just simply because they were super beautiful, and I felt like they just had an easy gliding ride through everything where I was trying to pitch and submit and get into things. So that always gave another layer of insecurity.VirginiaAgain, this is patriarchy, right? If we're all pitted against each other, then men have more control over women. And it's interesting that Memoirs of a Geisha, which was this very like formative influence on you, was portraying women pitted against each other. And then that's replicated in the industries you move into. And in Memoirs of a Geisha, it's not really a critique. He's not arguing that they should form an alliance, that they should reject the system. There's none of that. So it just kind of keeps perpetuating this representation of Asian women. It's all piling on top of each other, and it's so hard to start to see the whole picture.KailaAnd then you're watching it in media happen too, right? With Britney Spears and Cristina Aguilera, who I don't think were enemies, but they probably became that way, because it was people started gossiping and then you just create conflict.VirginiaWomen are cast into these roles, and in order to hold on to the power that we have, it becomes necessary to keep playing these roles. What was it that helped you start to dissect all of this? Because you're clearly in a really different place with your relationship to all of this now, what was it that made you start to say, like, okay, I'm actually participating in a whole system that is harmful to me, that it doesn't align with my values.KailaI don't think I even had any clarity about that until, like, maybe 10 or 15, years ago, when I got sober. I had quit modeling, and I had started a musician career. And then we had a little bit of success, but then ultimately, we weren't making any money. And I was in my 30s, so I was like, okay, I need to find a real career now. Because this wasn't working for me. So even then, I wasn't thinking critically about things. I was trying to find my career. But only when I got sober and I started going to a therapist, that's only when I could even look at anything with the drugs and alcohol. Everything is hazy and you could rationalize anything really. It's funny, because I do a lot of therapy and trauma therapy and IFS therapy. And it's much easier being sober and and having a support group and walking through some of the trauma as someone decades older than the little 21 year old. But it's just so important, I think, to deal with the trauma. Because I stuffed it down for decades. So then I kept having to feel it in different ways, and suffer through it. And I think when you just process the feelings and let them pass, feel them, then you're, they're no longer haunting you and your subconscious.VirginiaBut it's hard work. I give you a lot of credit. That's major uphill work. And you do a really incredible job in the book of reckoning with where you were complicit. You talk about pushing some of the younger girls in the band to be more sexual than they were comfortable with, because you were trying to make sure the band was appealing to Asiaphiles. This is not quite the same, but before I did this, I was a women's magazine writer and wrote a lot of really terrible diet stories. It's hard to look at how we participated in such toxic systems. KailaYeah. When you're a fish swimming in water, you have no idea. And it's important to look back, I think, and reflect on it. And I think the positive part of it is that I feel like Gen Z and Z and Gen Alpha, they're so much more aware, and they're already kind of being critical as things happen. Whereas for me, I did it decades later, and there's nothing that could be changed. But if we could just keep having these conversations and look critically at things while they're happening. Right now we're like, doing this whole reckoning where we're apologizing to the women of the 2000s, like the Paris Hiltons and the Monica Lewinsky's and Amanda Knox right now because we treated them horribly. Virginia How has that changed your relationship with beauty and with beauty work now? I mean, you talked about complicated feelings about your breast implants, which makes so much sense. I'm curious if any of it feels more optional now? Do you still feel like you have to opt in? KailaI think writing the book was one of the most healing things, which was an unexpected outcome that wasn't the intention of writing the book, I guess. And then also, my editor, Amy Lee, is an Asian American woman, so she could deeply relate to a lot of what happened and had experienced similar things. It is complicated, because I still dye my hair. I still like to look pretty. I think what it isn't is male-centered. And that just might just be because I'm older. I'm not dressing like I dressed in my 20s. VirginiaYou're like, I would like to be comfortable now.KailaBut I would love to aspire to be where Pamela Anderson is now, where she just is makeup-less on a red carpet and everyone's like, this is amazing. And if more people could do that, and we could become just more normalized to that, I think that's where the change would really, really happen.VirginiaShe has had such an interesting arc, and I give her a lot of credit, that she's just like, why are you even talking about this? I'm just showing up with my face. And I think women are like, oh, this is so inspiring and amazing. And then when you see the male comments...KailaOh I haven’t been reading.VirginiaThere are so many men who are personally let down to learn that it was all fake. They frame it as, she was faking it the whole time, she was never really beautiful. If this is what she really looks like. "She was lying to us for years." And this whole premise of men thinking that women wearing makeup is "lying" is so interesting, because this is what we're supposed to do to please you. This is the standard that patriarchy requires of us. You don't get to feel personally betrayed that we have held these standards.KailaI love how they're personally offended.VirginiaThey're like, "But I watched Baywatch for years. She didn't look like that!"KailaShe was also 21, right? Women age, as do men! VirginiaIt's like when Jennifer Love Hewitt was was doing her publicity tour for I Know What You Did Last Summer. They rebooted it, and everyone was like, oh my God, she doesn't look the same anymore. And it's like, great, it's been 20 years. She was 17 or something when she made the first one. Now she's a mom with three kids. She doesn't look the same.Absolutely wild. And meanwhile, men are allowed to age and become silver foxes.KailaI think more and more we're just showing older women like that's normal and not having crazy amounts of surgeries. Like, I think it's just all about normalizing. So we could see more and more of this. Like, one really good example is how when I was growing up, Asian men weren't seen as desirable. They were emasculated. But now that K Pop is big, there are a lot of women who are suddenly into Asian men as they were never before. Media representation is so, so important.VirginiaAnd I think it's useful for us in our own lives to think like, well, what can I give myself permission? I mean, I'm with you. I'm still dyeing my hair, but I'm every now and then I'm like, are we ready to let the grays out? I don't know. It's important to at least name for ourselves: I am participating in this labor. I could opt out. That feels scary. There's parts of this I enjoy because it's fun to feel pretty and I mean that's what I try to do with my own kids, at least. Like, when they see me putting on makeup or whatever, it's like, "I'm participating in patriarchal labor! Also, it's just a lipstick!" They're like, we get it.KailaThey're so much more aware.VirginiaWhen we do feel like we can opt out of something, that's really liberating, when you can say, okay, I'm not going to. I don't hold myself to the thinness standard anymore. That's not what my body is. It's not what it ever is gonna be without intense, traumatic interventions. And so that one I'm letting go. Other ones are harder to let go.KailaI guess it's maybe the conservative movement, because that's all about controlling bodies in a negative way. Because we've swung towards the Ozempic thin again, which I find it troubling that a lot of body positive icons are like, suddenly shrinking.VirginiaIt's kind of what we were saying. On the one hand it is really hard to exist in a fat body in this world. Everyone is allowed to make their own choices about their bodies. And it's sad that we're losing fat representation. It's sad that we're seeing more homogenized thin bodies. And it's tricky, because I really believe we can't police people's individual choices. KailaYeah, so tough, so tough to be a woman.VirginiaIt really is. It's a whole thing. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈ButterKailaWell, I just finished bingeing this show called The Girlfriend on Amazon Prime. VirginiaI don't know that one!KailaIt has Robin Wright, and her son gets this girlfriend, and there are some things about her that the mom doesn't like, and then they go to war against each other. It's not really great for, like, female on female. But it's really well done. It's like, more trashy kind of drama. VirginiaWe love some trashy drama!KailaIt's escapism. VirginiaAll right, I'm going to check that out. Less trashy, but definitely drama. I just finished watching Dying for Sex on Hulu. Oh man, all the trigger warnings. If you have anyone in your life, any cancer stuff, choose carefully. It goes to dark places. But like, such a beautiful story of female friendship. Who knew Jenny Slate was this incredible dramatic actress? You're used to her being so goofy, comedic and she has so many layers in that performance. It's so nuanced and beautiful. Oh, my God. I just absolutely loved it. Cried through so many episodes. KailaYeah, I went back and listened to the podcast. VirginiaOh, I want to do that!KailaIit's such a unique story, right? Because we're seeing so many reboots and, like Marvel. And I just love an original story. VirginiaIt's so original, for anyone who hasn't seen the show, I'm not spoiling this. It's in the first episode, she's diagnosed with terminal cancer. She leaves her husband and she's never had an orgasm with a partner. She really wants to explore her sexuality before she dies, and she kind of embarks on this whole journey with that. It's, like, edgy and raw and very dark, at times, but also very joyful and empowering. And, yeah, it's just, it's not a story that gets told very often, that's for sure. KailaWould a guy ever have sex if he didn't have an orgasm, right? Women are just like, not having orgasms all over the place.VirginiaYes, yes, the rage I felt about that. Kaila, thank you so much for doing this. This was wonderful. Tell folks where we can find you and how we can support your work.KailaYeah. My name is Kaila Yu, so you could find me on all social media websites. And then the book is in all bookstores and I say, support your local bookstore.🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it's time for your October Extra Butter episode. Today we're talking about plus size fashion influencer and body acceptance advocate Katie Sturino — who teamed up with WeightWatchers last year. What happened there? And where is the line between body liberation activism and capitalism? (Yes, we struggle with that too!) To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you do need to be an Extra Butter subscriber. Join Extra Butter! Already an Extra Butter subscriber, and having a hard time getting this episode in your podcast player of choice? Step by step instructions are here! Episode 217 TranscriptCorinneWelcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! If you're listening to this, you are part of Extra Butter, which means you're our favorite Burnt Toasties. VirginiaYour support makes all our work possible and keeps Burnt Toast an ad- and sponsor free space. Which is relevant to today's conversation! CorinneToday, we're going to talk about influencer and advocate Katie Sturino, who became famous on Instagram for her #SuperSizeTheLook content and for creating the Megababe product line. But more recently, she teamed up with Oprah and Weight Watchers, and has gone public about her use of GLP-1s.VirginiaSo before we get into it, let me do my standard caveat that I give anytime we do one of these episodes where we talk about a particular person's work in deal. Body autonomy is a given at Burnt Toast. Katie has the right to take her GLP-1s. That is her business. We're not interrogating that personal decision. We are also not "women tearing down other women," which is the other go-to critique of this work. We're considering Katie's entire body of work here, and we're asking: Is this true body liberation activism? Or is this an example of capitalism co-opting activism? I think that's a valuable question for anyone in the influencing space to be grappling with. I think Corinne and I both walk that line as well in our work. So we are going to critique Katie and some of the professional choices she's made but this is a lens we all benefit from looking through. CorinneWith that, I feel that I need to disclose that I have received gifted products from Megababe.VirginiaFor example! It’s a gray area, guys. I have not, but I would have been happy to receive that gift. CorinneI recommended stuff from Megababe before I ever received free stuff! But I have received free stuff. And I do like some of their products. VirginiaThis episode is also not going to be a critique of specific products. Preventing thigh chafing is a noble endeavor.So how did you first encounter Katie Sturino? Do you remember when you first became aware of her work?CorinneIt's honestly hard for me to remember because I feel like she's been around for so long!VirginiaLike 10 years.CorinneIf not more!VirginiaIt was the mid-2010s when she really came onto the scene.CorinneI definitely encountered her Instagram. I think it was her style content. I remember seeing her going into a store and trying on stuff that didn't fit, or trying their biggest size and it wouldn't work for her. And then I also remember the #SuperSizeTheLook.VirginiaFor folks who don't know: #SuperSizeTheLook is a series where Katie picks a photo of a celebrity wearing a really cute outfit, and then styles herself wearing the same outfit. Usually not in identical pieces, because the sizes are not going to work. But she mimics the outfit, and she mimics the pose really well. If it's a celebrity getting out of a town car with a purse on her arm, Katie will also be getting out of a town car. Or walking a tiny dog. She mimics the whole vibe of the photo. And the goal is to show you that bigger bodies look cute in clothes. Which is a message we're here for! CorinneWhat about you? How did you first encounter her?VirginiaWhat's interesting about Katie and me is that we are the same age, we are both 44. And we both come out of the New York media world. I learned this all researching the episode; I don't know her personally. I never worked with her. But we have sort of similar trajectories into body liberation work.And when she first launched, her blog was originally called The 12ish Style. I was also a size 12-ish. Those were my Midsize Queen years, before moving into full plus sizes. So we've had similar trajectories of being in this space first a mid-sized person, and then a small fat person. I've always been interested in her fashion and the way she styles stuff, because it was often quite directly relevant to my own body, though not necessarily relevant to everybody. She is also, like, a foot taller than me, I think? She seems quite tall in photos and she wears very tall heels, too, which is impressive to me, if not actually something I can pull off. But I've always appreciated the vibe and the energy of Katie's content.  She's very open book. A lot of her posts are shot in her underwear, wearing no makeup, in a swimsuit. She's always showing us, "Here's what my real body looks like." There are critiques to be made of this genre of content making, but I think it's also powerful to see non-airbrushed, not super thin bodies. I think there's a lot of value in that. So I knew Megababe, I knew #SuperSizeTheLook, but I didn't know a ton of her backstory. So I did a little research, and most of what I'm going to share with you comes from a New York Times piece that ran in June with the headline, What Katie Sturino Wants You to Know About Her Body (and Yours, Too). This is by Madison Malone Kircher and it ran June 22, 2025.We're going to get into it later in the episode, but Katie is not thrilled with this piece. And I just want to say I have empathy for being in the New York Times and not being thrilled with the way they cover your work. Can relate! So I am going to quote from the piece, because I think it makes some interesting points, and there's some useful context in there. But I'm not saying this piece does the best job analyzing her work. The New York Times describes Katie as "a dog-obsessed public relations pro turned body positivity influencer slash entrepreneur, who built a social media audience by posting candidly about her life."Katie began her career in fashion PR. I think her first job was at Gucci or Dolce Gabbana. She then started her own PR firm in the 2010s. And then found found Internet fame as a dogager, which is a dog manager, running an Instagram account for her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Toast. So this is how she started. Did you know she was a dog influencer before she was a fashion influencer?CorinneI think I do vaguely remember that.VirginiaToast has since passed away. RIP Toast. Great name for a dog, obviously. But I did not know that she started as a dog influencer. That was news to me, and, frankly, rather delightful. But: Coming from a PR background, finding Internet fame through dog influencing...this is a very specific lens to which she's coming to this work. Katie is now a multi-hyphenate. She had a podcast called Boob Sweat. She wrote a non-fiction book Body Talk, which is an illustrated workbook about self love. She has a Substack newsletter. She has the Megababe the product line. And she published her first novel this spring. So Katie is very busy! She is doing a lot. Have you followed her for recs, or you've used Megababe? You like Megababe. CorinneI've used Megababe. I like Megababe. Her particular style has never quite been for me. It's hard to describe exactly what doesn't click for me. It's just very clear, even just reading the this bio—she's very savvy, she's always hustling, she always has kind of a business PR angle, which I both respect and don't relate to.VirginiaThis is her New York media roots. I never worked with Katie, but I worked with lots of Katies. I know this kind of hard-charging woman who's extremely smart and great at marketing and knows how to build a brand and talk to an audience. So she has that whole skill set—and she could be doing it about body positivity, she could be doing it about a dog. She's interested in building a brand. For example, let's consider her first novel Sunny Side Up. Katie tells the New York Times that she worked with a ghost writer: "I don't have the traditional path that a lot of people who write books have had, and I needed help," she said, adding she felt no shame or embarrassment about having a collaborator."I love how upfront she is about that. A lot of books are written by ghostwriters, and I sort of wish people were more aware of that. Mine were not. But I have been a ghost writer! So I don't mind that that's a part of it, but I do think that it's interesting that it wasn't Katie had a novel inside her that she was dying to write. It was that Katie knew that having a novel would be a good brand extension. And the novel is about a plus size fashion influencer who goes on to launch a plus size swimsuit line. And... Katie's plus size swimsuit line came out this summer right after the book launch.CorinneIt's honestly mind boggling. How does anyone handle all that?VirginiaYes, it's so many things. And it does make me take a slightly different look at some of her some of her body positive content. For example, a recurring theme is her in a swimsuit. And the caption is always something like, "figured you could use a size 18 woman in a swimsuit on your feed," just showing her normal body in a swimsuit. But now that I know she's selling the swimsuits that hits differently. So is that just a smart swimsuit marketing strategy or does it feel off to you? CorinneI mean, both? She seems incredibly smart. I'm just impressed that anyone can do as much as she's doing. And: I do think sometimes it feels like you're being sold to, you know?VirginiaAnd because her work is centered around a message that has a social justice component, and a self-help component: Where is the line between "these are her values, and she's built a business on her values, "and "she's co-opting advocacy rhetoric to sell us products?"CorinneIt's definitely a gray area. VirginiaTo further the gray area: I looked at more of her content and I'm also like, these swimsuits are pretty cute. There's also this whole Wirecutter piece I want to talk about, where she goes over her fashion favs. It's good! I clicked through so many links. I was like, "Do I want these $460 jeans? I don't know!"CorinneOh now I want to see them.VirginiaYet I'm also thinking: But you are supposed to be so raw and authentic, and this is your whole vibe, and you're showing us yourself in a swimsuit, because that's supposed to feel brave. First of all, that's problematic in and of itself. Can it stop being brave for fat women to wear swimsuits in public? I would love that to not be a heroic move anymore, but in Katie Sturino's world it is radical to do that, and she's doing it. And... she's selling us the swimsuit.CorinneWell I think there are a lot of ways in which Katie is a very acceptable spokesperson for this messaging. VirginiaSay more about that.CorinneWell, first of all, she has a background in PR. And I think, even at her biggest she's...VirginiaShe's glamorous.CorinneShe's pretty, and she has a certain style. She looks wealthy, I want to say.VirginiaWell, she sure is, because guess who officiated at their wedding? Former mayor of New York City, and friend of her family, Michael Bloomberg.CorinneOh, okay, yeah.VirginiaThis is from the New York Times: "In addition to their apartment in Chelsea, the couple splits their time between homes in Palm Beach, Florida and Maine."CorinneI mean, they are definitely in a different tax bracket than myself.VirginiaSo yes. Wealthy. CorinneBut there are also people who are wealthy and wear Blundstones and barn jackets, you know? She's wearing blazers and heels.VirginiaA lot of pantsuits.Corinne A lot of jewelry. And she's always on vacation somewhere tropical.VirginiaYeah, in an amazing caftan. She's leaning into glam.CorinneShe looks polished. VirginiaShe's very polished. It's very New York City. Like, Sex and the City vibes. She could hang out with Carrie Bradshaw and she would totally fit in with them at one of those fancy lunches. And that's cool. That's her aesthetic. It's also representative of a certain socioeconomic privilege level. This is something that I saw frequently in women's magazines, and something I talked about when Jenn Romolini came on the podcast: So many people who work in New York City media, at the high levels, come from privilege. It is a very nepo-baby-driven industry. Because these are jobs that you have to do tons of unpaid internships to get. And/or work for no money as an assistant. The only way you can do that is if you have family money supporting your ability to access these industries. So it's not surprising to me that she comes from a privileged background, because she comes from PR and fashion, and that's who works in those industries.And I still think it's interesting and somewhat transgressive to be a woman in a larger body in that world. It helps me understand why it felt radical to be a size 12 dressing like a celebrity, because a size 12 in that world is an extremely non-normative body, right? This is the tier of people who have access to all the personal trainers, who are playing tennis all summer. There is no space to be a fat person in that world. So even at a size 12, it feels like, oh my gosh, your body is so other. The scale is just different when you move in these different spaces. So I can critique the space. I can be like, okay, you're friends with billionaires, and that's a hard place to be in a larger body of any kind. Did you take a look at the Wirecutter piece where she was giving a lot of like clothing recs and it's like advice for dressing as a plus size person?CorinneYes, I did take a look at it. She does have some good recs in there. I will say very expensive recs. Her preferred white t-shirt is $100.VirginiaAnd you're going to get spaghetti sauce on it so fast. CorinneIt's a weird vibe. VirginiaOkay, so now let's talk about Oprah and Weight Watchers. In 2024 Katie posted a critique of the first ABC special Oprah did about GLP-1s. And she gave a fairly nuanced critique. There was stuff she liked, there was stuff she didn't like, but she specifically said, "They came so close, and I wish Weight Watchers had fully apologized for the harm they had caused by pushing all of us to diet and want to change our bodies for so long." She was like, oh, they almost got it, but they didn't. And then in response, CEO Sima Sistani got on Instagram and did apologize. She did this speech of, you're right, Katie. I was wrong. Like, we've been wrong. We've done harm, and kind of fully walked into it. So what was your take when that all happened? CorinneTo be honest, I wasn't paying too much attention. But I do think the best apology from Weight Watchers would be them closing down, you know? It's very weird to me to be like, "Yes, we realize we've done harm, and we're just going to keep doing it."VirginiaWell, and what they were really apologizing for was selling a plan that didn't work and now they're selling GLP-1s. So it's, "We have the thing that'll work now!" As opposed to apologizing for trying to make us all do this in the first place. CorinneEven Katie going on Instagram and calling out the CEO— something like that, would just never occur to me, because I don't know, I just would never expect someone at Weight Watchers to respond or care. And I also think Weight Watchers is a microcosm, you know? It's like, sure, Weight Watchers has done harm, and they're just part of a bigger system. And you're not acknowledging that there's a bigger system there.VirginiaWell and Katie did get a response. Now, on the one hand, Katie has many more Instagram followers than you, so there's that piece of it. But I think it's an open question how planned this was, and whether they had talked ahead of time that Katie would critique and that Sima Sistani would publish her apology. Because I mean number one, no Weight Watchers CEO can just casually hop on her Instastories and apologize without having run the plan by many lawyers to make sure that she wasn't going to tank the business. So that had to have been planned, to some extent. And then the next piece of this is later last year, Katie had her own interview with Oprah in a different special, this one sponsored by Weight Watchers. And then she went on to host a podcast for Weight Watchers. So at some point, Katie got paid by Weight Watchers. Whether it was not until she hosted the podcast, or whether she was paid to be on the special with Oprah, or whether she was in a sponsorship deal with them when she asked for the apology, we don't know. But at some point, she moved from activist to on the payroll of a diet company.CorinneWasn't her response like, "Well, they were going to pay someone, it might as well be me? Or like it might as well be a plus size person." VirginiaWhat she said in the Oprah interview is, "If we don't have this conversation, if we don't insert our voice into this conversation, someone else will. Someone else will make those decisions for us." That's her argument. She wants to be in the room where it happens. She wants to be representing plus size people to these companies and with these companies. But she's not doing it pro-bono. She's not Tigress Osborne, Executive Director of NAAFA, depending on fundraisers to pay for plane tickets to places. She's doing this as a multi-hyphenate with three homes who's now getting a paycheck from Weight Watchers.CorinneYeah, it's so complicated. Because on the one hand, I can see her point. If Weight Watchers is going to be giving money to someone, it's kind of good that they would be giving some of it to fat people. So on the one hand capitalism, we're all kind of forced to sell out in some way, and on the other hand, you don't love to see it. VirginiaYou don't love to see it.CorinneEspecially when that person has three homes. VirginiaIt's a moment where I think her experiences of marginalization as a fat person erased her ability to see her privilege as a wealthy, white person. If Weight Watchers is going to pay fat people, Katie Sturino is not the person I need them to pay! I am not the person I need them to pay. Those of us in a certain tax bracket, living at a certain privilege level, are not the ones who need cash reparations from Weight Watchers. It's lower income folks who have paid to be in those meetings for years and years, who took their daughters to those meetings, who this company preyed on because it was an "affordable" approach to weight loss. And took their money over and over again every time they regained the weight and came back.CorinneWell, this is all is reminding me of the book Dietland.VirginiaBy Sarai Walker, friend of the show, yes.CorinneWhere the the heiress of the diet company is using profits from the diet company to do a type of reparations, vigilante justice. VirginiaI don't think that that's what's happening here.And I want to look a little bit at what Katie's defense has been around all of this. She's not afraid to talk very directly to haters who criticize her about her body. So in the New York Times piece, she disclosed that she's taking a GLP-1 for her own weight loss, and she then shared in a video that this was a medical decision, that she didn't really care if she lost weight or not that it was doing it to manage her A1C whatever. Again, that's Katie's business. I have no opinion about that. But she's in a smaller body now—not down to a size 12, but a mid-sized body now—and she's still pushing herself as a face of this movement. And that is a little bit complicated. She's talked about how it doesn't matter what size she is, she gets flack all the time. Like, when she was a size 12, she was too small to be representing body positivity. As a 22 people said she was too big. She's always, always, always getting constant comments about her bodies. And you know, that is really hard to deal with. That is not welcome feedback.And it is tricky that she has made her body very much her brand, I don't know, I struggle with this. It sounds like I'm saying she's asking for it, and I'm not. But you're posting content in swimsuits all the time. You're showing us your rolls, and then you're saying we shouldn't talk about people's bodies. Bodies are the least interesting thing about us. But her body is very interesting to her. She's making it a center of her work.CorinneI mean, you're making some points. It's hard to land in one way or another here. I do think the cost to being a public figure in the way that she is, in some ways, is people harassing you. And I think that's horrible and too high a cost. I also think she's made some really strange decisions, like working with Weight Watchers and still wanting to defend body neutrality or whatever.VirginiaYeah, she prefers body neutrality to body positivity, we should say and that's fine. I'm not attached to either term, to be honest. CorinneI feel like I always end up more confused than than I started on these subjects.VirginiaWhere did you start? CorinneI think where I started was Katie Sturino neutrality. Like I just sort of felt like she's not my people or whatever, and then I do feel kind of bad for her getting all this criticism and and then also I just feel, mad that people have so much money. But what do we do? I don't know.VirginiaI think it's complicated by her decision to take the Weight Watchers money. I think if she was just taking GLP-1s, that's her own business. Her body changing is her own business, even though she makes content that really centers her body. I would be backing her, like, yeah, that's not for people to interrogate your body. It's still your body, it's not your business. And I think she's walking a really complicated line by deciding to then also monetize her weight loss, by hooking up with Weight Watchers. That feels different, because she's promoting Weight Watchers, which means she's selling weight loss to other people. She's suggesting that these GLP1s are a good option for other people. Maybe she hasn't directly said those words, but she has done the Oprah special. She's lent them her brand, which has a lot of credibility. Someone said to me, l"I go out of my way to buy Megababe, even though it costs a little more than comparable products, because I want to support Katie. I want to back her work." People invest in her because they believe in her mission. CorinneThat's true.VirginiaAnd now she has attached that mission to Weight Watchers, which is selling GLP1s and obviously selling weight loss. That's where it loses me a little for her to then be like, how dare people talk about my body? You're literally selling this new version of your body. You're showing it to us because you're marketing this thing. That's where it gets really murky. On the other hand, there's a video that I'll link to where she talks quite a lot about how the internal work we need to do on body acceptance has nothing to do with the scale, and she does seem to really want to make the point that she feels very detached from her own weight loss numbers. That's not why she's on it. And she makes the point that if you don't do your own internal work, you can lose tons of weight, and you would still be miserable with your body. The weight loss is not a solution for body image struggles. And I think that's valuable. And I think there are a lot of people who listen to her who need to hear that. So I think that's useful. And it then is confusing that she's like, "But also Weight Watchers is great now."CorinneOne through line in a lot of her content is that it does feel like sometimes the bigger picture is missing, like the intersectionality. I'm not a super close follower, so maybe I'm just missing it. But I feel like I'm not seeing her do a ton of advocacy for other fat people.VirginiaWell, she really stays in her lane, which is fashion. I don't hear her talking about healthcare access, don’t hear her talking about workplace discrimination, housing discrimination. Definitely not how anti-fatness intersects with racism and other marginalization. I don't think that's a focus of hers. And in some ways, that's fine, and in some ways that shows, I think, that she's not here for a deep dive into the world of fat liberation. Okay, so our big Burnt Toast question that we ask in all these episodes: Is Katie Sturino a diet?CorinneYes?VirginiaShe is selling a diet...by working with Weight Watchers. CorinneAnd I think just by embodying a very narrow line of fatness.VirginiaShe is selling a specific image of acceptable fatness.CorinneWhat's your take?VirginiaI started this episode wanting to be able to say no, in part just because everybody expects me to say yes.CorinneI know I think I'm usually on the no side. VirginiaYeah, you're usually the no and I'm usually the yes. But I think the more we talk about it, I think I'm landing there as well. But I also think she's the embodiment of this larger issue, which is: So much activism happens through social media now. And social media is a business. It is where people are building brands and making money and that means that activism gets infused with business in these really messy ways. I think plus size fashion influencers as a category have really not done a great job with this, because we have seen this trajectory of using body positivity rhetoric, even fat liberation rhetoric, and centering fat joy, celebrating you look so great in all the clothes... and then forgetting all of the other work that goes along with that, and then if they manage to achieve body changes, very quickly changing their tune about how important all of this is. I don't think she's Rosey Beeme, who's like, "Forget I ever liked fat people." I don't think she's that at all, but I do think she has not done the work of intersectionality here. CorinneYeah. It kind of feels like a like microcosm of everything that's happening in the US right now. VirginiaFor sure, for sure.CorinneIt's hard to not just extrapolate out. VirginiaSo are we saying I should not order the $460 jeans?CorinneI mean, don't ask me on this stuff, because I'm always like I do want to know. I do want to know if they're good jeans. VirginiaI do want to know. I am curious!  CorinneThis would make a good Patreon post. VirginiaI don't know that they would fit me. I have to look at the size chart and figure out if it's like a Gap 35 or if it's like a designer brand 35.CorinneI feel like it depends on if they have stretch or not. I bet they do. Katie seems like someone who would be going for stretch jeans.VirginiaShe does also do all those underwear tests where she checks whether things rolls down. That's valuable content. CorinneShe is brave. She's doing the videos that personally I would not want to do.VirginiaYou don't see me on my in my underwear on the Internet. I mean, I am on WikiFeet, but that was not my choice. That's as scandalous as I get. All right. Well, that was a very interesting conversation. Listeners, we want to hear what you think. Where do you land on this one? Have you followed her work? Have you felt, had mixed feelings about the Weight Watchers of it all? Do you have a totally different take? You can tell us in the comments. ButterVirginiaOkay, my Butter, I gave you a little preview. You can tell because we're on Zoom together, and you can see a different background behind me. But I moved my desk to a different part of my–actually, not even a different part of my office. I moved it from being parallel with the wall to being kitty corner between two walls. And I'm so much more comfortable in my office! And I realized I had my desk too close to the wall and it was not size inclusive. I was always bumping up against the wall behind me, and what a dumb thing to do in one's home office where you have total control. I had just decided the desk needed to face a certain way. I don't know what made me think it was necessary. A lot of it is the pressure on having a good Zoom background? But I've decided unless I'm doing TV or something, I'm going to keep my desk in a more comfortable place. CorinneI think that's really reasonable. VirginiaAnd it just made me think: How many other small ways do we accept our homes or our cars or whatever not being comfortable for our bodies? Like this cost $0. I literally slid the desk over to make more room. Make more room for yourselves!CorinneTotally, it's so funny how hard that stuff is to notice sometimes.VirginiaI hadn't even realized that's why I was uncomfortable. I do also need a new desk chair. If people have desk chair recs, I want those in the comments as well. I really would like to know because I'm in a crappy West Elm ancient desk chair. It's like oddly off balance. It's not good for my lower back. But I want one that's not a million dollars and not ugly.CorinneGood luck with that. I'm also really admiring your Cape Cod collarless sweatshirt.VirginiaOh, my cut collar sweatshirt. It's really cute, right? It was too tight in the neck. It's pretty tight in the waist. I was debating maybe cutting that somehow too I haven't quite figured out. Like, if I cut off the band at the bottom and it's just sort of like, boxy, would that be cute? CorinneI think it would be cute. I think it'd be more cropped. VirginiaCorinne, what's your Butter?CorinneMy Butter is a Butter that has been Buttered before. It's Taskmaster. I know it has been mentioned by other burnt toast guests, but you know what it is, or?Virginia it's an app where people come and do things for you?CorinneNo, nope. That's TaskRabbit.VirginiaI was like, why are you recommending the gig economy? CorinneAnd I've actually had very mixed results with TaskRabbit. Not recommending that one. Someone blew up a light bulb on my ceiling. That's a story for another day. TaskMaster is a British TV show, there's a comedian host, and then there are like five comedian guests, and they get assigned psychotic tasks. Like, I don't know, like, open this paper bag without using your arms or some seemingly impossible task, and then you watch them do it, and they get ranked and get points. The first episode that I watched, I was laughing so hard, I was crying, peeing my pants, like my abs were sore. And it is just very easy to watch, like, you just laugh and it's funny.VirginiaI don't usually do reality TV with my kiddo for our show, yeah, but this does sound like a fun one to watch with her. CorinneYeah, I will say there's like, some mild--they're comedians, so there's some mild innuendo and stuff.VirginiaI mean, I think I'm going to write a whole essay about this, but I love watching inappropriate television with my children. I think it opens up many great conversations.CorinneGreat. Well, you should definitely watch it, though it's on YouTube, and I have been paying for seasons. But someone actually in the Burnt Toast chat today was saying that they watch it for free on YouTube. So now I'm confused. I really am enjoying Taskmaster.VirginiaWell, that's delightful, yeah, all right. Well, this was a great episode. Excited to hear what everyone thinks about. What furniture are you moving, what tasks are you completing, tell us in the comments. The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies!The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today, my conversation is with Lisa Sibbett, PhD. Lisa writes The Auntie Bulletin, a weekly newsletter about kinship, chosen family and community care. As a long time Auntie herself, Lisa often focuses on the experiences of people without children who are nevertheless, in her words, "cultivating childful lives." We’ve been talking a whole bunch about community on Burnt Toast lately, and Lisa reached out to have a conversation about the systems that get in the way of our community building efforts—specifically our culture's systemic isolation of the nuclear family. This is one of those conversations that isn't "classic Burnt Toast." But we're here to do fat liberation work—and so how we think about community matters here, because community is fundamental to any kind of advocacy work. Plus it brings us joy! And joy matters too. I super appreciate this conversation with Lisa, and I know you will too.Join our community! Today’s episode is free! But don't forget, if you were a Substack subscriber, you have until October 28 to claim your free access to our paid content. Check your email for your special gift link! Episode 216 TranscriptLisaSo my newsletter is about building kinship and community care. I live in cohousing, and I’ve been an auntie for many years to lots of different kids. I’ve always been really involved in the lives of other people’s children. And people who have lives like mine, we often don’t really have even language for describing what our experience is like. It’s sort of illegible to other people. Like, what’s your role? Why are you here?And all of this has really blossomed into work that’s definitely about loving and supporting families and other people’s children, but I also write about elder care and building relationships with elders and building community and cohousing. And I have a chronic illness, so I sometimes write about balancing self-care and community care. VirginiaI have been an instant convert to your work, because a lot of what you write really challenges me in really useful ways. You have really made me reckon with how much I have been siloed in the structure of my life. It’s funny because I actually grew up with a kind of accidental–it wasn’t quite cohousing. We had two separate houses. But I was the child of a very amicable divorce, and my four parents co-parented pretty fluidly. So I grew up with adults who were not my biological parents playing really important roles in my life. And I have gotten to the point where I’m realizing I want a version of that for my kids. And that maybe that is just a better model. So it's fascinating to consider what that can look like when not everybody has those very specific circumstances. LisaIt’s a dreamy setup, actually, to have amicably divorced parents and extra parents.VirginiaI’m super proud of all of my parents for making it work. My sister —who is my half sister from my dad’s second marriage—has a baby now. And my mom made the first birthday cake for them. There are a lot of beautiful things about blended families. When they work, they’re really amazing. And it always felt like we were doing something kind of weird, and other people didn’t quite understand our family. So I also relate to that piece of it. Because when you say "cohousing community," I think a lot of folks don’t really know what that term means. What does it look like, and how does it manifest in practice? What is daily life like in a cohousing community? LisaThere are different synonyms or near neighbor terms for cohousing. Another one is "intentional community." Back in the day, we might think about it as kind of a commune, although in the commune structure, people tended to actually pool their finances. I would say that cohousing is a much more kind of hybrid model between having your own space and being up in each other’s spaces and sharing all of the resources. Join the Burnt Toast community! So I really think of cohousing as coming frpm where so many dreamy social policies come from: Scandinavia. In Denmark and I think other countries in Northern Europe there is a lot of intentional urban planning around building shared, communal living spaces where there are things like community kitchens and shared outdoor space for lots of different residences. So that’s kind of the model that cohousing in the US tends to come from. And sometimes it’s people living together in a house. Sometimes it’s houses clustered together, or a shared apartment building. It can look a lot of different ways. The shared attribute is that you’re attempting to live in a more communal way and sharing a lot of your familial resources. In my cohousing community, there are just three households. It’s really, really small. We really lucked into it. My partner and I were displaced due to growth in our city, and needed to find a new place to live. And we had been talking with some friends for years about hoping to move into cohousing with them. But it’s very hard to actually make happen. It takes a lot of luck, especially in urban environments, but I think probably anywhere in the United States, because our policies and infrastructure are really not set up for it. So we were thinking about doing cohousing with our friends. They were going to build a backyard cottage. We were thinking about moving into the backyard cottage, but it was feeling a little bit too crowded. And then my partner was like, "Well, you know, the house next door is for sale." So it was really fortuitous, because the housing market was blowing up. Houses were being sold really, really fast, but there were some specific conditions around this particular house that made it possible for us to buy it. So we ended up buying a house next door to our friends. And then they also have a basement apartment and a backyard cottage. So there are people living in the basement apartment, and then, actually, the backyard cottage is an Airbnb right now, but it could potentially be expanded. So we have three households. One household has kids, two households don’t, and our backyard is completely merged. We eat meals together four nights a week or five nights a week. Typically, we take turns cooking for each other, and have these big communal meals, and which is just such a delight. And if your car breaks down, there’s always a car to borrow. We share all our garden tools, and we have sheds that we share. There are a lot of collective resources, and availability for rides to the airport ,and that kind of thing. VirginiaThere are just so many practical applications! LisaIt’s really delightful. Prior to moving into cohousing, we never hosted people at all. I was very averse to the idea of living in shared space. I was really worried about that. But because we have our own spaces and we have communal spaces, it sort of works for different people’s energies. And I certainly have become much more flexible and comfortable with having lots of people around. I’m no longer afraid of cooking for 12 people, you know? So it just makes it a lot easier to have a life where you can go in and out of your introversion phases and your social phases.VirginiaI’m sure because you’re around each other all the time, there’s not the same sense of "putting on your outgoing personality." Like for introverts, when we socialize, there’s a bit of a putting on that persona.LisaTotally. It’s much more like family. We’re kind of hanging around in our pajamas, and nobody’s cleaning their houses. VirginiaYou have that comfort level, which is hard to replicate. It’s hard even for people who are good friends, but haven’t sort of intentionally said, "We want this in our relationship. "There are all those pressures that kick in to have your house look a certain way. This is something I’ve been writing about —how the hosting perfectionism expectations are really high. Messy House Hosting! LisaAbsolutely, yeah. And it’s just such an impairment for us to have to live that way.VirginiaFor me, it took getting divorced to reckon with wanting to make some changes. I mean, in a lot of ways, it was just necessary. There were no longer two adults in my household. The moving parts of my life were just more. I suddenly realized I needed support. But it was so hard to get over those initial hurdles. Almost every other friend I’ve had who’s gotten divorced since says the same thing. Like, wait, I’m going to ask people for a ride for my child? It’s this huge stumbling block when, actually, that should have been how we’re all parenting and living. But it really shows how much marriage really isolates us. Or, a lot of marriages really isolate us. Our beliefs about the nuclear family really isolate us and condition us to feel like we have to handle it all by ourselves. So I would love to hear your thoughts on where does that come from? Why do we internalize that so much? LisaVirginia, you’ve been cultivating this wonderful metaphor about the various things that are diets. VirginiaMy life’s work is to tell everybody, "everything is a diet."LisaEverything’s a diet! And I feel like it’s such a powerful metaphor, and I think it really, really applies here. The nuclear family is such a diet. You have done, I think, the Lord’s work over the last couple of years, helping us conceptualize that metaphor around what does it mean to say something is a diet? And the way that I’m thinking of the Virginia Sole-Smith Model of Diet Culture is that there’s an oppressive and compulsory ideal that we’re all supposed to live up to. If we’re not living up to it, then we’re doing it wrong, and we need to be working harder. And there’s this rewarding of restriction, which, of course, then increases demands for consumer goods and forces us to buy things. Then, of course, it also doesn’t actually work, right? And all of that is coming out of a culture of capitalism and individualism that wants us to solve our problems by buying stuff. VirginiaI mean, I say all the time, Amazon Prime was my co-parent.LisaI think the nuclear family is just part of that whole system of individualism and consumerism that we’re supposed to be living in. It really benefits the free market for us all to be isolated in these little nuclear families, not pulling on shared resources, so we all have to buy our own resources and not being able to rely on community care, so we have to pay for all of the care that we get in life. And that is gross. That’s bad. We don’t like that. And you also have written, which I really appreciate, that it’s a very logical survival strategy to adhere to these ideals, especially the farther away you are from the social ideal. If you're marginalized in any way, the more trying to adhere to these ideals gives us cover.To me, that all just maps onto the nuclear family without any gaps. Going back to your specific question about why is it so hard to not feel like in an imposition when you’re asking for help: We’re just deeply, deeply, deeply conditioned to be self reliant within the unit of the family and not ask for help. Both you and I have interviewed the wonderful Jessica Slice in the last few months, and she has really helped me.Jessica wrote Unfit Parent. She’s a disabled mom, and she has really helped me think about how interdependence and asking for help is actually really stigmatized in our culture, and the kind of logical extension of that for disabled parents is that they get labeled unfit and their kids get taken away. But there’s a whole spectrum there of asking for help as a weakness, as being a loser, as being really deeply wrong, and we should never do it. And we’re just, like, deeply conditioned in that way. VirginiaSpeaking of community care: My 12-year-old was supposed to babysit for my friend’s daughter this afternoon, she has like a standing Tuesday gig. And my younger child was going to go along with her, to hang out, because she’s friends with the younger kiddo. I was going pick them up later. But then we heard this morning that this little friend has head lice. And that did make the community care fall apart! LisaOh no. It’s time to isolate!  VirginiaWhile I want us all to be together....LisaThere can be too much togetherness. You don’t want to shave your head.VirginiaThat said, though: It was a great example of community care, because that mom and I are texting with our other mom friends, talking about which lice lady you want to book to come deal with that, and figuring out who needs to get their head checked. So it was still a pooling of resources and support, just not quite the way we envisioned anyway. LisaIt always unfolds in different ways than we expect.VirginiaBut what you’re saying about the deeply held belief that we have to do it all, that we’re inconveniencing other people by having needs: That myth completely disguises the fact that actually, when you ask for help, you build your bonds with other people, right? It actually is a way of being more connected to people. People like to be asked for help, even if they can’t do it all the time. They want to feel useful and valuable and and you can offer an exchange. This sounds so silly, but in the beginning I was very aware, like, if I asked someone for a ride or a play date, like, how soon could I reciprocate to make sure that I was holding up my end of the bargain? And you do slowly start to drift away from needing that. It’s like, oh no, that’s the capitalism again, right? That’s making it all very transactional, but it’s hard to let go of that mindset. LisaYeah, and it just takes practice. I mean, I think that your example is so nice that just over time, you’ve kind of loosened up around it. It's almost like exposure therapy in asking for help. It doesn’t have to be this transactional transaction.VirginiaAnd I think you start to realize, the ways you can offer help that will work for you, because that’s another thing, right? Like, we have to manage our own bandwidth. You wrote recently that sometimes people who aren’t in the habit of doing this are afraid that now I’ll have to say yes to everything, or this is going to be this total overhaul of my life. And  No. You can say no, because you know you say yes often enough. So talk about that a little bit.Community building for introverts!LisaAbsolutely. I come at this from a perspective of living with chronic illness and disability where I really need to ration my energy. I’ve only been diagnosed in the last few years, and prior to that I just thought that I was lazy and weak, and I had a lot of really negative stories about my lack of capacity, and I’m still unlearning those. But over the past few years, I’ve been really experimenting with just recognizing what I am capable of giving and also recognizing that resting is a necessary part of the process of being able to give. If I don’t rest, I can’t give. And so actually, I’m doing something responsible and good for my community when I rest. You know, whatever that resting looks like for me or for other people, and it can look a lot of different ways. Some people rest by climbing rocks. I am certainly not one of those people, but...VirginiaThat is not my idea of relaxation. LisaBut, whatever, it takes all kinds, right? And I think that the systems of community care are so much more sustainable the more that we are showing up as our authentic selves. VirginiaYou talked about how you schedule rest for yourself. I’d love to hear more about that. LisaThat was an idea that I got from a really, really, really good therapist, by far the best therapist I’ve ever had, who herself lives with chronic illness and chronic pain. She initially suggested to me that whenever I travel--I have a hard time with travel--that, like, if I travel for three days, I need to book three days of rest. If I travel for two weeks, I need to book two weeks of rest. That’s a radical proposition to me, and one that I still am like, yeah, I don’t know if I can quite make that happen. But it did inspire me to think about what would work for me. And the reality of my life for many, many years, is that on a cycle of one to two weeks, I have at least one day where I just collapse and am incapable of doing anything. I can’t get out of bed. So this conversation with my therapist inspired me to go, you know, maybe I should just calendar a day of rest every week. Instead of having an uncontrolled crash, I can have a controlled crash, and then I’m making the decision ahead of time that I’m going to rest, rather than having to emergently rest when other people are relying on me for something, right? It just actually makes me more reliable to rest on a calendar.VirginiaAnd it honors that need. You’re not pretending that’s not going to happen or hoping you can skip by without it. You’re like, no, this is a real need. This is going to enable me to do the other things I want to do. So let’s just embrace that and make sure that’s planned for. It’s really, really smart.LisaWell, and you know, I’ll say that not having kids makes it much easier, of course. But I hope that there are ways that parents can schedule in little pieces of rest, even, of course, it’s probably not like an entire Saturday. But, the more that families lean into aunties and community care, the more that that space can be carved out. VirginiaSo let’s talk about the auntie piece. Is it just something, like, because these friends live next door and they had kids, you found yourself playing that role? How do you cultivate being an auntie? LisaThat’s a great question. For me it was kind of both always going to happen and a conscious choice. I grew up in a big family. I’m one of six kids. I spent a lot of time babysitting as a kid for both my siblings and all the kids in my town, and some of my siblings are a lot older than me, so I became an aunt in my teens, and so I’ve always had kids in my life. Really, I can’t think of a time when I didn’t have little ones around, which I think is a real benefit, not a lot of people have that kind of life. And I was raised by early childhood educators. My mom is a teacher. My grandma was a preschool teacher. My other grandma is a teacher. There are a lot of teachers in my family, and a lot of them worked with little kids, so there are a lot of resources available to me.But then I also did have to make some conscious choices. I think that one of the early things that happened for me was one of my best friends asked me to be her child’s godmother, and that kid is now 17. I know, she’s a teenager, oh my god. So that relationship in my 20s started to condition me to think: How do I really show up for a family? How do I really show up for a child that’s not my own child? And then when we moved into cohousing, which was in 2019 right before the pandemic started. We knew that we would be involving ourselves more in the life of a family. More on Lisa's childful lifeAt that time, my partner and I were hoping to have kids, and I ended up losing a lot of pregnancies. We decided to not become parents, but so we were initially envisioning sort of raising our kids together, right? And then when my partner and I decided not to have kids, one of the things that we sort of decided to pivot toward is like, well, we’re going to really invest in these kids who live in our community, which we already were, because the pandemic hit and we were a bubble. So many people know the story. All the adults are working full time. There’s no childcare. There are little kids. So it was really all hands on deck during that time, and it really pushed our community into a structure of lots and lots of interdependence around childcare and I spent a lot of time with these kids when they were really little, and that really cemented some bonds and forced us to make some very conscious decisions about how we want to be involved in each other’s lives. To the point that once you get very involved in the lives of kids, you can’t exit. Like, even if you wanted to. And so that changes your whole life trajectory. Moving to Mexico is off the table for me and my partner until these kids are at least out of the house, and that’s many years down the road, right? It would be harmful for us to separate from these kids at this point. So, there are conscious decisions and just sort of happenstance. And I think for anybody who’s interested in becoming an auntie or recruiting an auntie: Every situation is kind of different. But the piece about making conscious decisions is really important and requires sometimes scary conversations where we have to put ourselves out there and be vulnerable and take risks to let our loved ones know that we would like to form these kind of relationships. VirginiaAs someone on the side with the kids, my fear would be that I’m asking this huge favor, and like, oh my gosh, what an imposition. Because kids are chaos and these friends have a lovely, child-free life--I love my children, standard disclaimer. LisaKids are total chaos.VirginiaKids are always in whatever vortex of feelings and needs that that particular age and stage requires and asking someone to show up for that is, it’s big. It’s big.LisaWell, I definitely can’t speak for all childless people, definitely not. But there are a lot of aunties who read The Auntie Bulletin, several thousand people who read The Auntie Bulletin, and a lot of shared values there in our community. Something that I think is a common feature among people who are aunties, or who want to be aunties, is: We really recognize how much we benefit from being in relationship with families. There are a lot of people, myself included, who were not able to have children and really want to have a child-ful life. We would feel a loss if we didn’t have kids in our lives. And so this was something that I was reckoning with during the pandemic, when my partner and I were providing really a lot of childcare for another family. People would ask me: Do you feel like you’re getting taken advantage of? What are you getting in return? What I realized during that time was, I’m getting paid back tenfold, because I get to have these kids in my life for the rest of my life, but I don’t have to do the hard stuff. And that’s really important. Parenting, I don’t have to tell you, is very hard. As a person with chronic illness and disability at this point, I’m very glad that I don’t have kids, because I don’t think actually that I have the stamina. It's not about capacity for love, it’s just about straight up physical energy. And so I’m able to have the benefits as an auntie of being parent-adjacent, without the cost. So I’m the winner in that transaction. And I think a lot of aunties think that way.VirginiaWell, that’s really encouraging to hear. And I think, too, what you’re talking about is just having really good communication, so people can say what they can do and also have their boundaries honored when they have to set a limit. That’s key to any good relationship, so it would apply here too. Subscribe to Burnt Toast! LisaYeah, totally.VirginiaThinking about other barriers that come up. I’ve been reading, and I know you’re a fan too, of Katherine Goldstein, and she’s been writing such interesting critiques right now of how youth sports culture really derails families’ abilities to participate in community. That’s a whole fairly explosive topic, because people are really attached to their sports. So, I’ll save the specifics of that for some time I have Katherine on to discuss this. Are youth sports a diet? Yes, absolutely. And we are not a sports family, but when she wrote about it, I immediately recognized what she meant, because every fall I noticed that my kids' friends become much less available for play dates because it’s soccer season. And it’s like, waiting for when soccer practice will be over, so that so-and-so might come over. Suddenly, even as a non-sports family, I feel like I’m loosely revolving around these schedules. And to bring it back to your work: That is one aspect of parenting culture that is really feeding into this isolation problem and this lack of community problem. This way that we’ve decided parenting has to be so intensive and performative around sports makes people actually less available to their communities. So this is a long way of asking my question: Do you think what we’re really talking about here is a problem with the institution of marriage or the institution of parenting, or is it a bit of both?LisaThat’s so interesting. I do think that youth sports is, like, by far, the kind of biggest engine of this. But there also are families that are, like, deep, deep, deep into youth performing arts that would have the same kind of function.Virginia Dance is another big one. Competitions taking up every weekend.LisaOr youth orchestra, sometimes those can be incredibly consuming and also incredibly expensive. So going with the grain of the parents that are really hyper investing in their kids activities: They will find community in those places often, right? It's a sort of substitute community for the length of the season, or whatever. And then my question is: What’s the culture within those spaces? Is it like, hyper competitive? Is it about getting to the national championship? Is there a sense of community? Is there a sense of supporting kids around resilience when things don’t go the way that they want them to? The cultures within these spaces matter. And I think it just ties back to the way that the nuclear family is a diet. Because we are so deeply incentivized to be fearful in our culture and to treat our problems with money, goods, services, activities. And the fear, I think, for a lot of parents, is that their kids are going to not have a good and happy life. So then there’s what Annette Lareau, an educational researcher, calls concerted cultivation, particularly among more bourgeois middle class families of trying to schedule kids to the hilt, to make sure that they get every opportunity in life, and they can therefore succeed through every hurdle, and never have any adversity. Or that the adversity that they have is character building adversity in some way. And so I think that the hyper-involvement in kids activities does come from fear that’s motivated by capitalism. And is that an issue of parenting culture or marriage culture or capitalist culture or gender culture?VirginiaAll of it. Yes. I mean, one thing I think about, too, is how these activities create their own community. But it's a very homogenous community. The child-free folks aren't there, because it’s only soccer families or dance families or whatever. And you’re only going to get families who can afford to do the activity. So it's a self-selecting group. This is not to say I’m doing a great job cultivating a more diverse community for my kids. I live in a white majority town. This is hard for all of us. We’re not saying you all have to quit your sports! But if that’s your primary community, that is going to narrow things in a in a way that’s worth reflecting on. To bring this a little more fully into the Burnt Toast space, where we talk about diet as metaphor, but also diets specifically: One question I am asked a lot from the aunties in the Burnt Toast community, is, "How do I show up for the kids in my life that are not my own, I don’t get to make the parenting calls, but for whom I still want to model anti-diet values?" Maybe there’s stuff the parents are doing with food that's sending a weird message, or dieting in the home, that kind of thing. LisaWell, my sense is for myself—and I try to preach this gospel at The Auntie Bulletin— is that there are a lot of these moments for non-parents who are really deeply invested in the lives of kids, where it’s not our call. And it’s just a tricky terrain for aunties or any kind of allo-parental adults who are involved in the lives of kids who aren’t their own kids. I’m really fortunate that most of my friends are pretty on board with an anti-diet philosophy. The people who are close to me, where I’m really involved in feeding kids are on the same page. But it comes up in other ways, right? Where I might have a different perspective than the parents. My sense is really that aunties do need to follow parents' lead that it’s actually quite important to honor parents’ decision makings for their kids. And we can be sort of stealthy ninjas around how we disrupt cultural conditioning more broadly. So I’m not super close to their parents, but we’ve got some kids in our neighborhood who are buddies with the kids who are a big part of my life. And those neighborhood kids get a lot of diet conditioning at home. There’s this little girl, she’s in fourth grade, and she’s always telling me about her mom’s exercise and saying that she can't get fat and she can’t eat that popsicle and things like that, which is really heartbreaking to witness. And it’s exactly that kind of situation where it’s like, I’m invested in this as a just a member of our society, but I also care about these kids, and it’s just not my call, you know? So I can just say things like, "Well, I like my body. I feel good that I have a soft body and I’m going to have another brownie. It tastes really good." And just kind of speak from my own experience, where I’m not necessarily trying to argue with their parents, or trying to convince the kid of something different. I’m just modeling something different for them. And I think it’s totally fine to say, "In my house, you’re allowed to have another brownie if you want one!" VirginiaThat modeling is so powerful. Having one example in their life of someone doing it differently, can plant that seed and help them reframe, like, oh, okay, that’s not the only way to think about this conversation. That’s really useful.LisaAnd I think affirming difference whenever we have the opportunity to do so is important. When a kid comments on somebody’s body size or shape, you can just always say, "Isn’t it great how people are different? It’s so wonderful. There’s so much variety."VirginiaRelated to modeling and fostering anti-diet values: I think there is a way that this collective approach to living and being in community with each other runs quite counter to mainstream narratives around what is good behavior, what are social expectations, and which groups do we let take up space. I’m thinking about how the group of soccer moms is allowed to be a community that everyone has paid to participate in, while the Black neighborhood having a block party might have the cops called on them. So, talk a little bit about how you see collectivism as also an act of radicalism.LisaYeah, thank you for that question. It’s such a good one. A soccer community that is literally pay to play, where there are increasing tiers of elitenes—that is coded as very respectable in our society. Whereas a block party in a neighborhood of color is coded as disrespectable, unrespectable, disreputable. The music is loud and the people are being inconsiderate and their bodies are hanging out. There is all of this stigma around collectivism. I find for myself it’s very insidious and subtle, the ways that collectivism is stigmatized. I have a theoretical allegiance to collectivism, but it takes having to actually ask for help to notice our friction and our resistance to that. You were talking about that earlier in the follow up to your divorce. And I’ve had that experience, when I’ve needed to ask for help around my disability and chronic illness, and there’s all of a sudden this feeling of like, oh, I shouldn’t ask for help. Oh, there’s something wrong with that. And I think that there actually is a dotted line there between our resistance to asking for help and that feeling like we’re doing something bad and anti-Blackness, anti-brownness, anti-queerness. Community is so, so essential for queer folks who have had to find their own family, choose their own community for for for generations. There’s this kind of whiff of disreputability around collectivism, and these narratives around these kids are running wild and bodies are hanging out and the music’s too loud, and like, what’s going on there? What are they eating? VirginiaThere are so many ways we police it all.LisaIt’s all really, really policed. I think that’s really well put. So I think it's important to reclaim collectivism and reframe collectivism as legitimate, valuable, important, meaningful. Collectivism is something that a lot of people who live in dominant white communities have actually had taken from us through the medium of compulsory individualism. We need to reclaim it, and we need to not stigmatize it in all the communities that are around us and our neighbors.VirginiaMaybe instead, we should be looking at other communities as examples to emulate.LisaAs resources, absolutely. The disability community as well. VirginiaI think that’s really helpful, and I’m sure it gives folks a lot to think about, because it just continues to show up in so many small ways. Even as you were describing that I was thinking about the stress response that kicks in for me after I host a gathering, and my house is left in whatever state it’s left in. And it’s like, of course, the house is messy. You just had 12 people over, and there are seltzer cans laying around and throw pillows out of place. That’s because you lived in your house. You used it. But there’s this other part of my brain that’s so conditioned to be like, well, the house has to be tidy. And now it looks like you’re out of control. But it’s that kind of thing, that inner policing we do, that is very much related to this larger societal policing that we participate in.LisaAbsolutely, yeah.VirginiaAny last tips for folks who are like, okay, I want to be doing more of this. Particularly folks who want to connect with child free folks, or for child free folks who are listening, who want to connect with more families with kids. Any little nudges, baby steps people can take towards building this?LisaMy big nudge is to practice courage, because it’s scary to put yourself out there. You have to be vulnerable when you ask to build a relationship that’s deeper with people. And I think it actually is analogous, in some ways, to forming romantic relationships. You have to take some risks to say what you want, and that’s a scary thing to do, but there are lots and lots of people out there who want to be more involved in the lives of families. And there are lots and lots of families out there who need more support.VirginiaWhen you were talking about the pandemic, I was like, I would have killed for an auntie. LisaEvery family needs an auntie. Two adults I love, Rosie Spinks and Chloe Sladden who both have wonderful newsletters, have been writing about this lately, that even having two adults is just not enough to run a household in the structure of society that we live in. I think that that’s right, even if you’ve got a man who’s pulling his weight, to crack open a whole other can of worms.Why Fair Play didn't work for ChloeVirginiaWhich, yeah.LisaThey’re rare, but it does happen, and even then, it’s not enough. We actually need more adults to make communities run than we get with the way nuclear families are set up. So it’s a really worthy thing to seek out aunties, and for aunties to seek out families, and it’s just a little bit scary. And you also have to be persistent, because when we offer, parents will usually say no. Like they don’t believe us. They think their kids are too wild and whatever. So parents have to persist and and families need to persist in being welcoming. VirginiaI would also add on the parent side, as much as I appreciated what you said before about aunties have to respect parents having the final call on stuff: It’s also an exercise in us having to loosen up a little. Not everything is going to go exactly the way you want it to go. The bedtime might look differently, meals might happen differently, there might be more or less screens, and we have to be less attached to those metrics of parenting and touchstones of our parenting day, and realize that the benefits of our kids getting to be with other people, way outweighs whether or not they eat three cookies or whatever it is. LisaYeah, the more that we live in community, the more we all learn to be flexible.VirginiaWhich is really the work of my life, learning to be more flexible. Work on flexibility with us! 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈Butter LisaI feel like this is pretty nerdy, but this is my true self. The Substack algorithm fed me a newsletter yesterday that I’m so excited about. It’s about The Babysitters Club, which was, like, my favorite thing. VirginiaOh you shared this. Oh, my God, I keep thinking  about it. LisaAnd then yesterday, I ran into my childhood best friend on the beach. I’m visiting my parents right now. We read a lot of Babysitters Club together. So I’m going to tell you this guy named Andrew Knott, who I had not heard of before, but the algorithm fed it to me, wrote a post called A Classic Children’s Book Series Has Me Questioning My Parenting, and he’s reading The Babysitter’s Club together with his daughter, who I think isa tween. So for those who aren’t familiar with The Babysitters Club, where have you been? But major cultural touch point, most important books of my childhood. And, you know, very like auntie-formative books as well. Yeah, he has this really great argument about how the babysitters in these books did like, 100% of the parenting for a lot of families.VirginiaThey absolutely did!LisaIt’s like, this weirdly dystopian situation where the parents are just like, I guess we’re gonna go to Atlantic City for a couple days. Have fun kids.VirginiaYes, yes, they took two 12 year olds along to babysit a family of eight children on a beach vacation and the parents are nowhere to be found. For sure, Mary Anne and Stacey can handle all of the Pike children roaming around the Jersey Shore. It’ll be no problem.LisaYeah, I don’t know. It made me laugh so hard. I feel like I’m always on the lookout for, like, good takes on my favorite books of my childhood. And I’ve got to say this one is an absolute winner. VirginiaAnd intersects so well with your work. My Butter is that I was thinking about the sort of evolving work of being more in community. And a really lovely win I had recently over the summer —and it also relates to what you were saying about scheduling rest— is that a friend of mine and I now have a standing Wednesday morning date, where we meet to walk in a local garden. We've been doing it all summer — every Wednesday, 10am, we walk in these gardens for an hour. And they are now about to close for the season and we're figuring out a replacement place to walk. But when I say walk—I mean, like, stroll, maybe stop and watch bees on flowers for 10 minutes. We’re just talking and strolling and we are not wearing athletic clothing. I call it a workout because it mentally gave me permission to put it on my calendar—that’s my Wednesday workout. But it is not cardio in any way. We’re just strolling around, chatting and and it’s just such a nice touch point. And I’m really proud of myself for making time for that connection with someone. And she’s a good friend, but prior to doing that, I could go three weeks without seeing her easily. And now we always see each other once a week, and we have invited other friends to join us. And the really funny thing, or really, thecool thing was one day, I went and did the walk with her, and then I had a doctor’s appointment. And historically, in the last year or two, my blood pressure has been inching up a little bit. It’s been a smidge high. So I was getting nervous for the blood pressure reading. And my blood pressure was normal to low! LisaOh my gosh. Gosh, because you’re looking at bees with your friend.VirginiaI texted her, I was like, I truly think we’re lowering my blood pressure. LisaYeah, it’s not weight loss. It’s looking at bees, on a schedule with your friends.VirginiaIt’s having a weekly appointment to watch the bees with your friend. Well, thank you, Lisa. This was so much fun. Such a great conversation. Tell folks where we can find you and how we can support your work. LisaYeah, thank you so much for having me. Virginia. I’m at The Auntie Bulletin, which is the auntie.substack.com and that’s the main thing I’m working on right now, so I hope people will come check it out. Thank you so much for having me.VirginiaIt’s really fantastic. And there’s just, if any part of this conversation has resonated, there’s like, so much more over on The Auntie Bulletin. So folks need to go check it out. 🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!Subscribe!

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! I’m Virginia Sole-Smith. Today, my conversation is with Laura Birek. You probably know Laura as co-host of The Big Fat Positive Podcast, but today she’s here to talk about her new book, co authored with Gia Gambaro Blount. It’s called Good to Go: A Fresh Take on Potty Training for Today's Intentional Parent.I'm years past potty training (thank God!!), but I honestly remember the pain of it better than childbirth. This is often a very fraught parenting milestone. And as with all things parenting: That means we encounter a ton of societal expectations and pressures around how to get potty training right, which makes it all even harder. If you, too, have been a victim of that viral three day potty training method, you'll want to hear this conversation. Laura has amazing advice about how to recover and do it differently. But even if you’re child-free or years out from this experience: What we’re really talking about today is how perfectionism and performative parenting can make life harder for parents (especially moms!) and really get in the way of kids’ body autonomy. And of course, promoting body autonomy is core to the work we do here on Burnt Toast.Today’s episode is free! But don't forget, if you were a Substack subscriber, you have until October 28 to claim your free access to our paid content. Check your email for your special gift link! And drop any questions or concerns here.PS. You can take 10 percent off Good to Go or any book we talk about on the podcast, if you order it from the Burnt Toast Bookshop, along with a copy of Fat Talk! (This also applies if you’ve previously bought Fat Talk from them. Just use the code FATTALK at checkout.)Episode 215 TranscriptLauraI am the co-author of a new potty training book that just came out called Good to Go: A Fresh Take on Potty Training for Today's Intentional Parent. You can find it everywhere. And then I am also the co-host of a long running parenting and pregnancy podcast called The Big Fat Positive Podcast. I’ve been doing that for over seven years now. Every week for seven years! VirginiaYou are an OG podcaster! I love the podcast. I’ve been on the podcast. But today we are going to talk about Good to Go. Because you reached out to me and you said, "Potty training culture is such a thing. Can we talk about it?" And I am not going to share my own children’s stories. But I’m going to say, yeah, it is such a thing. And it really messes with our heads. And of course, my work is all about investigating cultural messages that mess with our heads, aka diet culture. So yes, let’s talk about potty training diet culture today. You kick off the book with the story of how you tried and failed to train your older kiddo, who you call Augie in the book. And the impetus was that you read the super popular three day potty training book that I think most of our listeners who have potty trained a child have encountered. Why did the idea that you could magically change potty train your child in three days go so wrong?LauraSo we kind of fell into that new parent trap of "This kid’s a genius!" He was hitting all his milestones early. He was such a talker. And I had been given that very, very popular three day potty training method that shall not be named. And I read it and really took it as gospel. And in the book, there were all these signs of readiness. And I was like, check, check, check, for Augie. It was stuff like, is he interested in the potty? And I thought, oh, this kid is ready, according to this book. And there were extenuating circumstances--namely, the pandemic. We were deep in the pandemic. We were also stuck indoors because there was a wildfire nearby, so we weren’t even able to go outside. That’s Southern California life for you. And I was in my second trimester with my second pregnancy. So all of these things came together to be like, well, you know, what the hell? Let’s give it a try. VirginiaWe’re trapped indoors anyways. LauraWe’re trapped indoors. Let’s spend three days naked and see what happens. And so the very first sentence of our book is: "I’m a failure at potty training." Which is a very weird way to start a potty training book.VirginiaBut so relatable. LauraOh, I hope it’s relatable! Because the thing is, we thought we were a success at the very beginning. Right after those three days, he was mostly making it to the potty. We were like, okay, we can take away diapers. But what we didn’t realize is that we had just entered into a state of constant vigilance with him. We were constantly reminding him to go, and we were always nervous about going anywhere and doing anything with him, like even just going to the park. We never got over the stress level, right? My mom would say, "He wasn’t potty trained. You were potty trained."VirginiaYou were trying to take him to the potty obsessively and monitor all the signs.LauraExactly, exactly. And the other thing was, I had this idea that having two kids in diapers was going to be hard. I don’t know where I got this idea! Everyone is like oh, you can’t have two kids in diapers.VirginiaIt feels like a really common cultural message. I’ve heard a lot of friends say that, who have kids close in age. "Oh we have got to get her out of diapers before the next one comes!" LauraActually having two kids in diapers is way more convenient than one who’s in a very early stage of potty training and a newborn! That was our first mistake. But we just continued to deal with this stress around going places. And at some point, I ended up having the baby. Augie was still out of diapers, but he was having accidents. In our book, we call them misses, but this author called them accidents, so we’ll stick with accidents. It’s the more familiar term. And he was having accidents all the time, and I was really stressed out about it. Then I take my new baby, we call him Sebastian, to a local place called the Family Room, which is where I did mommy and me classes, and then toddler and me classes with my now co-author, Gia Gambaro Blount. I brought him for a lactation support group. But Gia happened to be there, and I descended upon Gia. I was like, "Gia, I need your help. Augie is having all these problems with potty training. I don’t know what to do." And she looked at me, and said, "Can I ask you something? When you decided to potty train him, did you tell him it was going to happen?" And I was like, "No." Because the book specifically tells you you’re not supposed to do that. VirginiaYou just spring it on them.LauraThe book tells you, do not even have the little potties out, because it will confuse their little brains. And I didn’t know anything about potty training at the time, so I was like, "Sure, that sounds legit. Whatever." So Gia was like, "You need to go back and ask him how he’s feeling about this." So I go back and I look Augie in the eyes. I’m like, "Hey baby. I know we’ve been having a lot of accidents. Do you think you want to go back to diapers for a little bit?" And he was like, "Yes!" Instantly. "Yes, yes, yes, I want to go back to diapers!" And I was shocked by that, because I thought he was going to be like, "No, I’m a big boy!" VirginiaHe was like, no, I’m really not ready for that. LauraAnd so we went back to diapers, which, by the way, in the 3 day method is a big no no. Like, huge regression. And there was also this strict thing about having to potty train between 18 and 30 months, and if you don’t do it between those times, you’ve ruined them forever. At least, that’s that’s the takeaway I had.VirginiaAnd if you could do it beforehand, even better.LauraYes! So I was really worried about all that. But the minute we put him back in diapers, the stress went away. And you know, TL/DR, he is not ruined forever. We ended up actually potty training him using Gia’s help just after he turned three. VirginiaEverything in your story is so deeply relatable. Because I think those first years of parenting are such chaos. And this is certainly not all moms... but there’s a certain kind of mom who is vulnerable to this message of "control as much of it as you can." Have the feeding schedules, track the ins and outs when they’re newborns. There is a need to have a lot of information and structure around what is otherwise just this sea of "when will we ever sleep again? When will anything happen?" That makes us really vulnerable to messages like "You want to achieve this milestone by a certain age." Or "You want to achieve this milestone before you have another baby." There is this idea that we somehow get a gold star if we get it done at a certain point. And now that I have kids who are way, way older, and I’m just like, "I don’t even remember when it all happened." You don’t look at a bunch of seventh graders, and think, "Well, I can tell  you didn’t potty train till 3.5." LauraAnd I think that I am one of those moms who is totally susceptible to that. We had a sleep schedule with my first. And I think part of it is that I had my kids later in life, I already had a career. And when you have kids, any control you have over your days, over your schedule, over your life, just flies out the window. So I think I was grasping at anything that would give me a sense of control in my life. And rightfully so! So I’m not saying that those things don’t help people —I actually do think some of the sleep schedule stuff helped us. Or we got lucky, and that just happened to align with my kid's personality.VirginiaYou had a baby who was like, "Yes, fine, we’ll do a schedule."LauraExactly. I don’t know. There’s no way to know, but it did give me a sense of control. The trap with that is, say you have a good experience, like I did with sleep training , and then you go to potty training and it’s not as successful. Suddenly you think it’s some kind of referendum on your own parenting. VirginiaYes! LauraHaving a second kid is really helpful — or third or fourth, I imagine, even more— but having more than one kid has really helped me realize that so much of parenting is luck of the draw with your kid’s personality and temperament and all that stuff. But with your first, it can feel like such pressure and such responsibility for you to be the person who figures it all out. When it turns out that a lot of things are just not figure out-able, or need time or a different approach, or you need to be flexible.VirginiaSocial media has not helped in all of this, for sure. I mean, not that everybody documents their kids potty training on social media, but it’s of a piece with needing to celebrate milestones in this public way, I think.LauraHopefully one of the gifts that we give with our book is this concept that potty training is not a light switch. It’s not a binary. You’re not either potty trained or not in some clear crossing the finish line manner. Instead, we describe it as a continuum in terms of how much parental involvement is required. So at the very, very beginning, those first days, weeks, even months, you’re in the highly involved phase, where you are doing a lot of reminding and you’re doing a lot of cleaning up of pee on floor. You’re doing a lot of thinking about it. Then you go into the occasionally involved phase, which is fewer accidents, they know they need to go, but you still have to wipe their butts until kindergarten, at least usually. That’s something that the other books don’t really tell you. They frame it as, "oh, you’re done after three days." But these kids need help! There are just some physiological reasons why little kids have trouble wiping their own butts. Their heads are huge! Their proportions are all off. Some kids physically cannot reach their butts. But no one’s telling you that. So our goal in the book is to try to shorten the highly involved phase so that you’re in the occasionally involved phase quicker, and then finally you'll get to the point where you’re rarely involved. We say that there’s some day in the future where you won’t know the last time your kid went to the bathroom. But that’s years away. I mean, in my house, it’s still getting announced! So if you can think of it as the spectrum of where you’re in this process, then you can be a little bit less like, oh, okay, so and so just posted "oh, my two year old potty trained in one weekend." You can know in your head: Okay, yeah, that just means they’re not wearing diapers on a daily basis, right? But caregivers are still involved.VirginiaYeah, it doesn’t mean the two year old is like, "Okay, mom, I’ll be back in a minute!"LauraPeople will come out of the woodwork and be like, "My two year old self potty trained, they won’t let me be involved. They do everything!" And it’s like, I am so happy for you. But that is not the majority of kids and we need to just understand that’s not an expectation we should have.VirginiaI also appreciate understanding the stages more, and the fact that you and Gia really emphasized that this means you can decide readiness, not just based on your kid. So: Are they achieving these certain milestones? Are they checking these boxes? But also: Consider yourself. Are you, the parent, ready? Maybe when you’re about to have a newborn, you don’t want to be in the highly involved potty training phase. If you don’t think you can get all the way to "less involved" by the time the baby comes, maybe put this on hold for a while. And that just gives us so much more permission to center our own needs in the process. And to actually have needs, which is another thing the three day discourse really leaves out. The idea that you as the parent would have any other things going on other than potty training.LauraMost of the 3 day experts say you cannot leave the house for three days. Okay, that’s great for a stay at home parent who has no other kids. But what happens when you have an older kid that needs to go to soccer practice? What happens if you have a prescription you need to pick up from the pharmacy?VirginiaOr you’re a single parent.LauraOr a single parent doing it all. Exactly.We were in a pandemic, in a wildfire, and that’s why I was like, okay, we can stay home for three days. There has been no other time in our lives we’ve been able to stay inside for three days. Those unrealistic expectations really set you up for failure. And then on top of that, the message in all these other methods is, "If your child is still having issues after the three days, you must have done something wrong. You must have not followed my method perfectly."That’s with so much of parenting, right? But no, every kid is going to react differently and have a different timeline. And also, sometimes prescriptions need to be picked up at the pharmacy. VirginiaMy listeners frequently get a little annoyed when I say everything is a diet. But: A system that tells you that if it didn’t work, it’s because you didn’t do it right is 100 percent classic diet culture. It’s classic like, well, if only you’d followed it, if only you’d have better discipline... as opposed to: This just isn’t a match for what you’re trying to do right now. This isn’t the way for you. Laura And it’s trying to police this thing that everyone has to do, too. I think that’s just such an interesting analog to diet culture as well. We all have to eat. I know you’ve written about this, right? Even the most restrictive diet is going to have to provide some food, because you will die. And we all have to eliminate our waste and, save children with medical issues that may prevent them from potty training, almost all of us are going to end up having to learn to use a toilet at some point. It’s this thing we all have to do. And yet, we’re being told there’s this one right way to do it. But there are also at least five different people saying their way is the one right way. What gets more diet-y than that?VirginiaAnother thing I really appreciated is what Gia emphasizes in terms of assessing your child’s readiness. Because it's not just the cognitive signs, like, do they have the language? Are they looking at the potty and interested or following you into the bathroom? She also talks about this concept of interoception, which is something that comes up a lot when we talk about helping kids be intuitive eaters. So again, there are these parallels between food and potty stuff. Can you explain how understanding where a child is with their interoception development can help you prepare for a more intuitive approach to potty training?LauraWe talk about the three realms of readiness: There are the cognitive signs, the social-emotional signs and the physical signs. But we further split those up into two categories. Some of these things are teachable signs, and then there are some unteachable things that are just developmental. A really good example of that is in the cognitive signs of readiness. An unteachable sign is whether your child is curious about you going to the potty, right? That is often listed as a sign of readiness, like, oh, your child wants to know what you’re doing. Why are you sitting on the potty? Wants to come be with you in the bathroom. You can’t teach that level of interest, right? And if you tried it would be weird. And interoception is another unteachable sign. There’s nothing we can do to force your child to have more awareness of what’s going on in their body. That’s a thing we’re kind of born with that is on another spectrum. Some people are incredibly sensitive. I’m a person who’s been accused of being a hypochondriac, and I think part of that is I have heightened interoception. I feel every ache and pain. I always felt when I ovulated, for example. I also heard once that only some people can tell when their heart’s beating. That’s just a sign that some people have a more sensitive sense of interoception versus others, right? We can’t teach it. It’s just the way your kid is. What we can teach is supporting their interpretation of their interoception. An example that’s not potty training related is if your child gets goosebumps, you can help them identify: Do you have goosebumps because you’re feeling cold, or do you have goosebumps because you’re scared? Goosebumps have a feeling associated with them, and you can’t teach them how to feel that. But what you can do is try to connect language to the feeling. And that’s hard. That is the hard work of potty training, honestly. And so Gia and I identified something we called the universal potty sequence, just to keep it short in our brain, which is, when we are as adults, go to the bathroom. We say we’re going to the bathroom. We think of it as one step, but in reality, it’s up to nine steps. We identified nine steps. But you know, it’s a bunch of different steps that the kids have to learn. It’s all new for them, right? So the first step is feeling. The sensation is that interoception, every step after that is kind of mechanical, right? Like you navigate to the potty, then you pull down your pants, then you sit on the potty, then you eliminate, then you flush, blah, blah, right? So we have this thing we call the rehearsal period. That’s about two weeks ish--again, everything is flexible--before you actually plan to take away diapers, where you teach everything on the universal potty sequence, all those steps, all those new things, all those new mechanics for them. Except step one: Feel the sensation. That one we are leaving to when you take away diapers. The point is when kids are thrown into "we’re taking away diapers. We’re taking away this thing that you’ve worn your entire life!" this way, the only thing they have to learn is how to connect the sensation to the need to go. Everything else isn’t brand new, so the other eight steps aren't so overwhelming. All we’re focusing on is interoception, and so that’s what we’re trying to really center in our method to help our kids connect the dots. And that’s why we also don’t forbid prompting. Some kids are not going to have a strong sensation, and you’re going to need to sometimes, in retrospect, be like, "hmm, there’s pee on the floor now, you you had a miss." And we say miss, because we don’t want there to be shame involved, right? We don’t want to say, oh, it’s an accident. It’s not really an accident. They just didn’t get to the potty in time, right? or they didn’t even think to try to go. So we say, "Oh, you had a miss. Do you remember what it felt like before it came out? Next time we feel that feeling, let’s see if we can catch it before we go." So we’re working on that. And some kids need that extra support. Honestly, my six year old still likes to get hyper focused, and so he does need to get prompted to this day. And no one would say, oh, that six year old’s not potty trained. He’s definitely potty trained at school. He’s fine, but sometimes we just need to help him connect. I mean, how many adults do you know who wait till the last second go to the bathroom?VirginiaThat’s me, every work day. What I love about this is how you’re really centering kids’ body autonomy in this process. And in way that is so counter to how I’ve seen body training explained before. This feels like such a huge shift. I mean, I remember when I was doing it with my own kids, feeling like, "the way I’m doing this doesn’t feel aligned with the way I’m thinking about feeding them," for example. When I’m feeding kids, I’m really focused on the power of their ability to say no to a food they don’t like, and why that’s important. And the importance of not pushing them past their fullness cues and helping them notice hunger cues. Their body autonomy is the center of it. And potty training is this thing where because we’re so focused on getting it done, because we’ve got all this pressure on it, it’s like... suddenly they don’t have body autonomy in the process at all. And that feels really troubling.LauraIt does. I mean, I came to that same revelation. It was part of what allowed me to feel okay with putting Augie back in diapers, VirginiaYeah, because you gave him his power back. LauraExactly and I realized this exact same thing you said. I am so dedicated to respectful parenting. I’m a Virginia Sole-Smith fan girl! Like I read all your books, and I'm offering foods without judgment, and all of that stuff. And yet, in this one realm, I fell into the trap of not just not centering his body autonomy, I like full on ignored it. I mean, it sounds awful, but I really did violate his own body autonomy. I forced him to do things he wasn’t ready for. And I do feel bad about it to this day. And it’s not an inconsequential thing, right? Like, people say, No one’s going to college still, still using a diaper. Everyone eventually learns to potty. And it’s true. But there is a lot of shame around using the bathroom. There was some Vice article that just came out, which said, like, 83 percent of Gen Zers have bathroom anxiety. And a bunch of them want to quit because of it. They don’t want to have a job because they’re afraid of using the bathroom. VirginiaI’m an old millennial, but I have some women’s magazine bathroom trauma. I understand what they’re saying. It’s a stressful place. LauraAnd I’m not saying I enjoy pooping in a public bathroom either! But there are consequences, and not just about anxiety. There are actual physical consequences to involving shame in the potty training process. There's encopresis, which is a specific type of constipation and a really big problem that is so hard to solve. I’ve heard from so many parents whose children have it. It's a form of chronic constipation, and what happens is you’re so constipated that liquid poop escapes around the sides of the impacted stool, and kids can’t tell anymore that they have to poop because their colon is so enlarged. And this is a much more common problem than people realize, and it’s really hard to solve once it’s started. It's something you really want to get ahead of. And that’s the other reason we say if your child is refusing to poop in the potty, give them a diaper. You need to get that poop out one way or another, and it’s not a judgment on whether you’ve been able to potty train them or not. We’re looking at the long game here. We’re trying to create a child who doesn’t have long term problems that require a ton of medical intervention. What’s worse, having to go to a GI doctor for the next five years or just giving them a diaper to poop in at the end of the day?VirginiaAnd giving them another month or six months in diapers, and then you try again. LauraIt goes back to the perfectionism, though. Like, when you put it that way, you’re like, yeah, of course, I’ll give them a diaper. But if you’ve been told no, they’re going to be confused. It’s failure. That's harder. It's not failure. These kids are way smarter than most people give them credit for, like, they will know the difference. They’re not going to be confused about what’s going on.VirginiaI think another piece of this body autonomy conversation is night training. I really love that Gia does not endorse night training. I mean, I have heard of parents setting alarms to wake toddlers up to pee at 11pm so that they could say they were night trained. Just tell us why this is so unnecessary.LauraNight training is absolutely unnecessary. We did a ton of research to make sure we were right. Night training is just not effective. It’s really a one hundred percent developmental shift that happens in your child’s brain and their body. When they are ready, they will be night trained. And there’s nothing you can do to force it. One in 6 kids at age six still wet the bed at night. At age seven, that goes down to one in 10. But that’s still a lot of kids! One in 10 kids in your second grade class are still wetting the bed at night. And that’s fine and developmentally normal. And so if we know that, if we can normalize that, it may lessen the pressure for night training. There’s a scientific term for waking them at night to sit them on the potty. They call it lifting. And the research shows that lifting has no measurable outcomes like lifting. People who practice lifting had no better results than people who just let their kids sleep. And I would imagine—this is just my hypothesis—that those parents are crabby because they have to wake up in the middle of the night to do it. And their kids are also probably crabby for having gotten woken up, even if they’re half awake, right? So we are firmly in the belief that you don’t have to do night training. That said, we tell you when to start looking for signs that it's time to take away night time diapers and how to do it. And also what to do when your kid is getting up to pee in the middle of the night, and that becomes a problem. So if your child is waking up in the middle of the night every night to go pee — we get into how to address that, what the root causes might be, and how to how to deal with that when the time comes. But we say do not do night training at the same time as daytime training. Your kids will likely just night train themselves during or after the process. One in 10 will take past age seven.VirginiaThe last thing I want to hit on is the stuff piece of potty training. There’s a lot marketed to us, a lot of gear, different types of potties, all of that. And I would love to hear your take on what is actually useful and what is just marketing, and you can probably skip. LauraLike anything parenting-related, mom-related specifically, there are going to be people trying to sell you a bunch of stuff. But I mean, basically you need a pot to piss in, right? Like, that is the bare bones of what you need. A lot of people ask us about the floor potties: Do I really need a floor potty? A lot of people find them kind of gross, unsightly. I get it. You don’t want to have a little toilet in your living room. Yeah, I didn’t either. But if you buy nothing else, we recommend having a floor potty. And you don't have to buy them — there are going to be 20 parents in your neighborhood who are desperate to get these out of their basements! You can get over the fact that it was used by another kid, just get some Clorox. You know, you’re fine. You don’t have to spend actual money on any of this stuff, because it is a thing that you only need for a narrow window of time. So we recommend, at the bare minimum, having a floor potty for this reason: There are three types of awareness when it comes to your internal body awareness. There’s sensation awareness, which is, oh, I have to go. The action awareness is: Is it pee or poop? And then there’s urgency awareness, which is like, the real key to all of this. Urgency awareness is how much lead time you have between noticing the feeling and getting to a toilet. And when you are first potty training, in the first days and weeks, that urgency awareness window is seconds. We’re talking like five seconds between when a kid recognizes and when they go. Because of that, we want to give them as many opportunities to have a win as possible, right? Like, you don’t want to clean up pee off your floor, and you want your kid to feel successful, right? The more chances they have to successfully make it to the potty, the better everyone’s going to feel, and the like, quicker the process is going to go. And sometimes the difference between a win and a miss is the time it takes to walk from the living room to the bathroom.In addition, there are a lot of things about the big potty that scare kids or just are really, really challenging for kids. It’s high up, so you have to have a step stool or something. Usually you have to have some kind of insert for the seat. So like, if you’re like, oh, I don’t want to buy a floor potty, you’re still having to buy a step stool and a seat insert. So that’s two things versus the one floor potty. And kids can be scared of the balancing being high up. They can be scared of the plopping, like the poop falling all the way into the bowl. We have some techniques to help them get over that, but there are just more barriers to entry for most kids to use the adult potty at the get-go. Obviously, you can work towards that. And I always hear from people like, well, my kid wouldn’t even go in the small potty. It’s like, okay, there you go. Now, you know. All the more reason to get one from some other parent. If you have a really big house, two floor potties could be helpful so you don’t have to be carrying them around everywhere you go. I mean the amount of time I’ve spent in my life carrying around a little floor potty full of pee. It’s just so gross. It’s such a glamorous life we live as parents. And then the only other thing that I’d say is really a good buy if you're in the car a lot, is a travel potty.VirginiaOne hundred percent. LauraThere are so many great ones now. I have the Oxo one, it like, folds up into this flat little package. And you can either pop the legs vertical, so that you put a little plastic bag in that has a little absorbent pad so that you can sit on the potty in the backseat of the car or the trunk or whatever. But it also folds out, so it can be a little seat to use in public bathrooms. And that’s honestly really great. Public bathrooms are a whole other topic that we actually talk a lot about in the book. But one major thing is that their butts are too small. They just so you either have to hold them, and it’s a whole thing, or you can have this travel potty with you, which gives them a seat that’s their size and makes it more accessible. ButterVirginiaWell, this was fantastic. Speaking of stuff, though, it does not have to be stuff. Laura, do you want to give us some Butter today?LauraI do. Okay, so I went straight from saying you don’t need to buy things for potty training, and then I’m going to tell you about this thing that I think you should buy for potty training. But I have to tell you about this because I have been giving these out to my friends left and right. Anytime I tell someone about it, they they’re like their mind is blown. They’ve never heard of it before, and so I feel like I have to share it, because it’s something that’s been so helpful for us, and that is a disposable travel urinal. Have you ever heard of these? VirginiaI do not have children with penises, so no.LauraWell, guess what? It works for children with vulvas, too. VirginiaWow. Okay!LauraSo it’s this universal spout. It’s basically this sort of oval shaped spout that, if you have a penis, you point this the top part up, and if you have a vulva, you point it down, just so it catches the pee. And it’s just a plastic bag, kind of like an emesis bag, but the difference is there’s a little zip lock top, so you can seal it off, and there’s like a gel pad at the bottom that’s dry when you get it, but it absorbs liquid, kind of like what’s inside of a diaper, right? And you can it folds up into this tiny little package that you can have in your purse. It’s saved us so many times when you are places where you just can’t get to a bathroom quickly, and they really have to pee. Because, I don’t know about your kids, but no matter how many times I tell them, like we’re leaving the park, let’s go to the bathroom. Yeah, no, I don’t have to go. And then five minutes into the drive home, I have to pee. I have to pee.And while I do have two children with penises, I don’t usually like to have them pee on random people’s yards, right? So really helps to be able to have this thing in the car. I will tell you the most clutch moment, which hopefully doesn’t get me canceled, which is we were in line. My six year old and I were in line for the Guardians of the Galaxy breakout ride at Disney California Adventure. And it was an hour long line. And I was shocked that he was focused and able to stay in that line the whole time. But we were almost to the boarding area, and he’s like, Mommy I have to pee and it was just me and him. I couldn’t send him with his dad or anything. And this line is like a maze, you know how Disney does it’s like they create this whole experience. But I didn’t know how to get out in any quick way, even if they would have led us back in the line, I didn’t know how to get out. And it was dark in there, all moody, and so it was scary. And I was like, okay, baby, just turn around. So I got him face away from the crowd, and he peed in the bag, and there was a trash can right there. And it saved us! so I highly recommend it. I have one in my purse at all times, just in case. I have yet to use it for myself, but it is apparently used by adults. Okay, yeah, yeah, absolutely so. And they, I don’t have a brand recommendation. There’s like 500 different brands, so just look up disposable urinal bags. VirginiaWell, my Butter is not something you can pee in, but It is body adjacent in thinking about this episode, and thinking back to earlier parenting years, because, as I said, I’m like, pretty well out of the stage. Now, I was remembering how much one of our favorite picture books at that time was Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder. LauraI love that book. VirginiaIt’s incredible. It should be in every parent’s library. It’s a go-to baby shower gift for me forever, because it’s just an amazing celebration of body diversity, which is all of Tyler’s work. So that’s a Butter I’ve given before, but just to re-up. But recently, a friend of mine gave me a print of Tyler’s of this beautiful, fat mermaid. I’ll put a photo of it in the show notes. And I actually hung it up by my bathroom, because our bathroom is near where our pool is. So now we have a lot of middle school girls changing into swimsuits all the time. And I am slowly making this bathroom my body celebration shrine. So I have three Tyler illustrations in that space. And I’m just adding to this little collection of body positive art so that when teenage girls are in there changing into swimsuits and having the feelings they can look around and be like, Oh, right. Bodies are cool. So, another way to think about your bathroom as a place to affirm that body autonomy matters. LauraYeah, it really does. VirginiaWell, this was a delight. Laura, thank you so much for joining us. Tell folks where we can follow you, how we can support your work.LauraYes. So as I said many times, my book Good to Go: A Fresh Take on Potty Training for Today's Intentional Parent is out in the US and Canada, wherever you buy your books. There’s also an e-book version you can find. We are hoping to get an audiobook going soon. And we also have a website that you can find us at and then listen to my podcast. We have great conversations all the time. We had Virginia on for two episodes when Fat Talk came out and one of our favorite episodes ever. And we are Big Fat Positive a pregnancy and parenting journey.VirginiaAmazing. Thank you so much for being here. LauraThanks for having me. I love talking to you.The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith (follow me on Instagram) and Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, and Big Undies.The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.Our theme music is by Farideh.Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!